Lux
by Punctuator
Summary: Unexpected followup to "Underground." Deadly misunderstandings, revenge, and apocalyptic weather make for a dark and stormy nightmare at the Lux Atlantic. Rated for language, violence, and adult situations. Welcome in, and enjoy your stay....
1. Chapter 1

He didn't like goodbyes. Not with her. Back from Scotland, nearly a week of hiking, sightseeing, drinking, and kayaking with Rippner's boss, John Carter, Carter's wife Claire, and the founder of the Highland feast, Fingal's Cave and haggis, coarse-ground oats, Ardbeg, and all, Claire's brother Richard, Rippner and Lisa Reisert parted at O'Hare.

Rippner hated it.

Not the display of affection: he contributed his half un-self-consciously, without embarrassment and with equal desperation. He held Lisa as tightly, he kissed her as deeply, as she did him. His expression, he was certain, mirrored hers as she walked off down the boarding ramp onto her connecting flight to Miami: weary, subdued, somewhat numb. No: he disliked the inefficiency of it, "it" being both the goodbye itself and the separation it heralded. They enjoyed one another's company; they more than enjoyed the sex they had. And now, if they were to continue as a "they," as an "us," they had to make do with the tools of separation. Text, e-mail. Long-distance masturbation, solo comfort, intimate fantasies murmured by phone. Awkward long messages on the answering machine. _Why?_ he thought.

Before he'd ransomed his BMW from long-term parking, _Why?_ had changed to _No._

Option one, the first and monstrous, the unacceptable one: a message for her machine, to be waiting when she got home, paraphrased:

_We can't do this. It won't work. The U.K. was fun, Lise, but we're done now. Have a nice life. Goodbye._

Option two: his company contacts in Miami who had ins in the real-estate market. He wasn't presumptuous enough to assume she would abandon her privacy in favor of moving in with him, or in favor of him moving in with her. Not yet. They were both too inured to living alone. But seeing her less than once a week was unthinkable. If he had a place in Miami, she would still have her own space; he would have his.

And they would be near enough to fuck (or screw, or make love, or simply cuddle: that quickly, with her, in her sure, certain, greedy, giving hands, so to say, his sexual horizons had broadened), or talk, or eat together, or work out together, or watch movies, or go out, whenever they damn well felt like it. Should they decide to move in together later, fine.

He'd had other women. They'd had him, too. He was in love with Lisa Reisert; consequently, "casual" was no longer good enough. That he could see her every day when he was stalking her, nearly three years ago, and see her only as a treat now was, in a word, unacceptable.

All this during the stop-start drive from O'Hare to his apartment, the silver 325i idling, patient and practical, in a dingy rain five degrees above freezing.

When he got in, he dropped his bags, re-set the locks, checked his messages-

_I have to turn this off in a minute-_

- Lisa's voice, beneath the ear-pop white noise of the pressurizing cabin-

-_ but I just wanted to say that I had a wonderful time, an incredible time, I love you, and I can't believe you won't be with me tonight. Talk to you soon. Goodbye, Jackson_.

That was the last he heard from her.

#####

She didn't return his calls or respond to his e-mails; she sent no messages of her own. For the first three days, he assumed she was too busy at work, too tired from the all-too-real shock of re-adjusting to post-vacation life. On days four and five, he was out of town, on the West Coast, making life nasty, brutish, and short for a man running national defense secrets out of the country under the simple, lurid disguise of digital piracy.

When he got back to Chicago, that being on day six, she still hadn't called. He called her, and got her machine, and left a message every bit as awkward and unconvincingly casual as he feared it would be. He detested that fear, but he was becoming worried now, too.

And when he said "I love you, Lisa," he meant it.

#####

Three days after that, his concern was souring with the first inklings of anger.

#####

On day twelve, following his return from Washington, D.C., where he and John Carter met with officially nonexistent men in a nonexistent bunker three hundred feet beneath the swamp that was the nation's capital and discussed nonexistent secrect-service policy over a very real lunch that Rippner could hardly bring himself to eat, Rosemary Wheeler came for a visit.

When the bell rang, Rippner opened the door without first checking the foyer cam. He might have been killed then and there; he might have disarmed with extreme prejudice a Jehovah's Witness hawking salvation and cheaply printed palm-sized pamphlets.

She was nearly his height, black hair worn long and careless. A subtle bruising crossed the bridge of her fine-boned nose. She assessed him with serge-blue eyes and half a smile. "You look less than pleased, Jackson."

"The last time I saw you, you shot me."

"And the last time I saw you, you were dead." She brushed past him, entering; he stepped aside, shut the door. She didn't bother asking him how he'd risen from the dead, after she'd put a bullet in his heart in the British Museum nearly a month ago; he didn't patronize her by discussing the advantages of thin-panel Kevlar and blood packs. Surprises, sleight-of-hand, out-and-out obfuscation: all part of the job. Even for agents, like Wheeler, now working freelance. She took a tumbler from the cupboard, ice from the refrigerator freezer. Rippner followed her casually across the living area to the liquor cabinet flanking the entertainment center. Rosemary poured herself a generous shot of freshly imported Ardbeg. "Did you get the bill from the clinic?"

In London, roughly four minutes after Wheeler had inflicted on Rippner that magically non-fatal bullet wound, Lisa Reisert broke Rosemary's nose with a well-placed right. When the bill from Wheeler's plastic surgeon turned up in Rippner's mailbox, he paid it without question, with an even temper and a touch of a smile. Professional courtesy. And something Lisa needn't know.

If she would reply to his messages. If she would bother to call.

"The check is in the mail, Rosie." He looked at her new nose. Appraisingly, if cautiously. "I like it."

"Aside from the stippling, you mean. When it settles, it should be a little less Sandra Bullock, a little more Emily Blunt."

"Tell me, Rose. Seriously." Rippner crossed his arms against his chest, watched her sip without flinching that fiery Ardbeg. "London: I didn't remove anyone near and dear from your life, did I?"

Roland Mason, thief, sometimes-antiquities-dealer, shot and killed by a buyer he accidentally— with Rippner's help— tried to cheat. Wheeler shook her head, directing a cynical smile at the golden contents of her glass. "Hardly. We were business partners, Jackson; that's all. But speaking of which—" —and now the smile lost its bitterness, and it was angled his way— "— how's _your_ love life? Long-distance relationships can be a bitch, can't they?"

The thought, again: _I haven't been able to reach her. She hasn't called._

"Can be. But I'm working on it."

"Jackson—!" Frank surprise, in Wheeler's tone, in her eyes. "You're not _serious_-serious about her, are you? Joint banking account, a mortgage, white picket fence, rescue mutt, one-point-eight kids-?"

"You know that's not going to happen."

"Does _she_ know it's not going to happen?"

"Jesus, Rosemary—"

"You can always adopt, Jackson. I took the sterilization bonus, too, you know. I've never regretted it, not for a second. I doubt you've regretted it, either. Something's wrong," she added, studying him over the rim of her glass. "Is everything peachy with Little Miss Pugnacious?"

"None of your business, Rosie; you know that."

"Oh, my God. She _dumped_ you, didn't she?"

He held up the bottle of scotch. "One for the road—?"

"Why don't we both have one, and I'll stay the night?"

Rippner set the bottle down and went to the door. She followed him, casually, glass still in hand. "Or aren't you that hard up yet?"

"No."

She met his eyes as the palm of her free hand pressed itself to his groin, as she fondled him through his jeans. "Feels like 'yes' to me."

She kissed him. Lingeringly. Rippner didn't pull away, nor did he respond. Rosemary flinched with a chuckle as the blade of the knife suddenly in his right hand pricked the skin of her left side.

"Back to 'no,' are we?"

"We never left it." Rippner's eyes remained effortlessly cold, but he could feel restlessness in the muscles of his lips. He could see her noticing. _Damn her_. "Get out, Rosemary," he said.

She reined in her fondling hand. "It's okay, Jackson. I have a plane to catch anyway."

He couldn't help asking: "Where to—?"

She tapped the side of her bruised nose. Cautiously, Rippner noted. "State secret."

"Anyone we'll hear about on CNN—?"

"Not on the breaking news. Maybe on the scroll. Still, it pays the bills." She kissed him again. "The ones that aren't covered by a certain handsome benefactor. See you, Jack. Thanks for the drink."

She handed him the tumbler and left.

#####

The next day, he was underground— literally— in the company's Chicago office. Post-run, post-workout, working with his mentor, Bruce Kemp, shock-haired, fortyish, tall and rangy, one of the senior programmers. No field trips on the schedule, no data to steal, no hackers to rough up or kill. They were just coming back from a jaunt to a local coffee bar when Paul Miller, one of the top three in Information Services, caught up to them in one of the bunker-level hallways. Five floors down, radio-quiet, relatively bombproof.

Miller looked like he had a bomb of his own to drop. The overheads, low-watt though they were, sparked glints off his red hair. His nearly colorless eyes looked more sub-aquatic than usual in his pale face.

"Jackson—" He gave Kemp a slight, professional trace of a smile. "Mind if I steal him away for a minute, Bruce?"

"He's all yours." Kemp nodded, walked off with his half-quart of dark roast.

Rippner took a sip of his own coffee. "What's up, Paul?"

As Miller looked after Kemp's retreating back, a troubled frown descended on his face. "There's something you need to see," he said.

#####

"When you first surveilled Lisa Reisert— that was 2005, right?— Information Services plugged her picture into what was then the latest in facial-identification software—"

They were in Miller's office; Miller was sitting before his 24-inch Apple flat-panel, currently screen-saving a slow-motion fireball. Rippner, standing behind him, said: "Get to the point, Paul."

"Today I was checking the program's I.D. log. Usual torrent of garbage. Everyone's uploading now; everyone has the latest zillion-pixel cameras; all those millions of images, all razor-sharp: the program's going nuts trying to keep up—"

"And—?"

"And an hour ago the hit-log showed me this."

He nudged his wireless mouse; the fireball faded—

A file from an amateur porn site. Eight minutes long. A man and a woman, only the man's head was out of frame—

"Clever how those assholes manage that, isn't it—?" Miller muttered.

- naked buttocks, a muscular but beefy torso, body hair in dirty red bristles. The woman was doing to him and having done to her things that women do and have done to them on amateur porn sites. Much of it awkward, uncomfortable, mechanical, most of it humiliating—

_Fucking my GF,_ the clip was labeled.

The GF was Lisa.

Miller was right. Image quality, even for amateurs, had improved a thousandfold in the last few years. The blemish below and to the right of Lisa's lower lip: right there. The skin tag centered on her throat, the freckle on her right shoulder: present and accounted for. The scar above her breast. Rippner felt his breath slowing.

"Who uploaded it?" he asked.

"Screen name: Erik the Viking. Four more clips available."

Eric Janssen. Rippner knew that torso. One of Lisa's co-managers at the Lux Atlantic. Two months ago, Rippner had nearly removed one of the man's kidneys, as part of a slightly less-than-friendly suggestion that Eric leave Lisa and her co-workers to enjoy a night out free of drunken molestation and general assholery.

He said, flatly: "This one: when?"

"Three days ago."

Rippner turned for the door. "Get me on the next flight to Miami, Paul."

"Jackson, whoa— Wait, you shouldn't— You can't just—"

But Rippner was already in the dim hallway, heading for the elevators while that eight-minute clip played on in his head.

#####

"One week, he doesn't call: he's a jerk," Cynthia said. "Two weeks, he doesn't call _or_ write: he's an asshole."

"Incoming, Cynthia," Lisa Reisert murmured, as another group approached the desk. She was at the Lux, working reception, and beyond the spurts and outright runs of customers— tourists, a convention of law-enforcement personnel, the first surge of spring breakers (and, God, the potential nightmare brewing _there_)— weather was coming in. The pressure was dropping. She had a headache; she felt nauseous. She looked out at the shifting sea of luggage, rumpled clothes, and unsettled, impatient faces, and dizziness washed over her. She leaned against the desk, her head throbbing.

"Are you sure you don't want to go home? You're turning green." Cynthia's wide eyes managed to widen that much more. "Lisa, are you _pregnant_—?"

"No. Absolutely no." Lisa shook her head, and it felt as though someone were pushing heated ball-bearings through the veins beneath her scalp. "It's just the weather; I've been this way since I was a kid. There's a storm coming." She took a deep breath, straightened, met the eyes of the customer nearest the desk. A man, sandy-haired, stocky and short, in chinos and a green polo. The slight, unconscious swagger of someone accustomed to the weight of a service revolver at his hip. "Welcome to the Lux Atlantic," Lisa said, smiling.

That smile. _The_ smile. The one that convinced everyone, even her, that everything was fine.

Even if Jackson hadn't called since their return from the U.K.

#####

That mob sorted, checked in, dispatched to the elevators and the carts of the bellhops, Lisa relaxed a bit. Cynthia had held her ground admirably, even facing the ostensible worst of the would-be frat-boy party-hounds. "We need to ask building services to step up installing those floor drains," she said, as the kids flip-flopped for the elevators, key-cards, cell phones, and duffels in hand. "We're gonna have to have those rooms hosed down."

If her aching head had permitted, Lisa might have chuckled. Still, she felt relieved: another rush survived. The computers were running slow, the weather front had fouled flight schedules all along the southern Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico, but it was nearly time to go home. To her right, his eyes on the monitor at his station, Cynthia's cohort on today's night shift, Eric Janssen, was shouldering against his ear the handset of his desk phone. "No, that's fine," he was saying. "So it's on? Good— Everything's all set on this end. See you soon. Bye."

He hung up, focused all of his attention on his monitor. Behind the lingering traces of her customer-service smile, Lisa frowned. _That sounded almost like a personal call, Eric._

Cynthia looked at the wall clock behind the desk. "It's seven-fifteen, Lisa. Seriously: we can handle it. Go home."

"You're sure—?"

"You've been here over an hour longer than you should. Go home. Take some aspirin, lie down."

"Fall down, you mean," Eric said, passing behind them. "Seriously, Reisert: get out of here."

Unusual for Eric to be even that concerned. He and Lisa weren't on the best of terms. Still, Lisa split a smile between him and Cynthia. "Okay, I'm going. Good luck tonight."

She left the desk, fetched her purse from the back office. She checked in with Julie Weber in Security, Julie catching a break from her foot-rounds to watch the bank of video monitors and grab a quick iced coffee; she checked her messages. One from her dad, none from Jackson. Eric caught her just as she was about to go out the employee exit.

"I'm sorry, Reisert." He was practically hyperventilating. "Fourteen oh eight: they're bitching up a storm, and I can't get them to calm down. You're better at this than I am—"

Lisa ignored the backhand compliment; Eric wanted something, that was all, and she wasn't in the mood to have her backside kissed. "What seems to be the trouble?"

"Shit. Where do we start? They say they were promised HDTV. There's not enough booze in the mini-bar. The piano is out of tune— as if anyone actually _plays_ those fucking pianos—"

"Fine, Eric, fine." She put her hand on his arm. "It's okay; I'll go up."

"I owe you, Reisert."

"You could start by calling me 'Lisa' sometime, Janssen."

#####

He followed her back to the desk. Cynthia was busy with the next influx of customers; she didn't see Lisa walk to the far bank of elevators.

Eric picked up the phone at his station, dialed a room code.

"She's on her way up," he said. He hung up. "Good evening," he said to the weary, middle-aged couple approaching the desk. He put on his best smile. Just like Reisert. "Welcome to the Lux Atlantic."

#####

Post-flight, outside the air-conditioned maze that was Miami International Airport, Jackson Rippner focused on his breathing.

The effect was like standing against a window at the top of the Sears Tower looking down, feeling the building give and sway in the wind, the heartflutter of vertigo. The barometric pressure had to be plummeting. The air itself was like a wet woolen blanket hung four clotheslines wide in the sun, hot and suffocating beneath an egg-carton sky. Lightning flashed against the bellies of the blackish-gray clouds, far out over the puckered slate ocean. The wind was blowing landward. Rippner, behind the wheel of a Hertz BMW Five-Series, feeling his blood pressure adjust to the air beyond his skin, tried to remember whether Florida was prone to tornadoes, or when hurricane season officially began.

He drove to her apartment building. He might have waited for her there. Inside. He still had the key she had given him, nearly two months back. He rang the buzzer for her apartment outside the security door instead. No response. He stepped out onto the sidewalk, turned, looked up at her windows, the glass reflecting the nearly black sky.

He might wait for her.

Instead, he got back into the BMW and drove to her hotel.

#####

The lobby of the Lux Atlantic was a zoo. Possibly the weather was delaying flights, messing with the hotel's servers: the scene was a practical riot of tourist groups, families, college-aged gangs, luggage, porters. Lisa wasn't at the desk. Cynthia was, red-haired and as deer-in-the-headlights as ever.

Eric Janssen was at the desk, too.

Neither of them saw him. Rippner turned to the right, toward the hotel's bar. His old routine when he'd stalked Lisa, that trio of years back, he found himself sliding into it: sit at the bar, scotch neat, half-facing the door, a perfect view of the lobby, all the while texting a friend he was to meet, maybe working the crossword in the _New York Times_—

"Mr. Rippner—?"

Rippner turned, found himself looking at a striking, poised blonde, medium height, trimly muscular beneath the tasteful blue pantsuit she wore. _J. Weber, Security Services_ on her name tag. Julie from Grover's. That night out, before London, with Lisa and her co-workers. The night he'd nearly removed one of Eric Janssen's kidneys.

"Yes, Julie—?"

"You remember me." She frowned slightly, but she looked pleased, too. "Do you have a moment?"

"Certainly."

What he was there for could wait. A moment's pause: another moment to assess his feelings, his focus. He saw Julie's granite-gray eyes scan the lobby professionally, but without targeting. She wasn't signaling. The possibility existed that she was netting him, setting a trap, but there were no undercovers in the lobby, none that Rippner could see. Possibly, too, she simply wasn't insulting him. She'd sized him up; she obviously knew his capabilities. If there were police moving in, she knew he would know.

He passed behind her through a door to the right of the stairs leading to the Lux's main restaurant, followed her down a well-lit carpeted corridor. He platinum hair hung precisely pony-tailed between her shoulder blades. Almost as if it were weighted at the tips. He nearly marveled at the balance of her; he found himself fighting the urge to reach out, touch her shoulder, just to witness the lethality she could unleash.

She preceded him into the hotel's security office. A bank of video monitors in crisp black and white. Two chairs, one behind the room's one desk, another one opposite it. She didn't offer him either.

"I know who you are, Mr. Rippner," she said.

Rippner's back stiffened. He met her eyes; Julie didn't look away. She continued:

"I've known Lisa Reisert for five years. She's a good, honest employee of this hotel, and I consider her a friend. I trust her. Know, however, that while you are on these premises, Mr. Rippner, my staff and I will be keeping an eye on you."

She was being honest with him. Rippner could respect that. He reciprocated. "I've been trying to reach her, Julie. Do you know where I might find her?"

Those gray eyes on him. Not seeing the stalker he once was, the jealous lover he'd become. Nor the killer he'd always been. "She's gone home for the day," she said.

"Thanks. Is that all—?"

She nodded him out.

#####

_It's over._

He'd been a fool. Worse: he'd nearly been a psychopathic fool. He'd try her apartment again, and then he'd catch the next flight home. A long, cold shower, a few hours' sleep, and piles of training tomorrow. He'd keep busy; he'd try not to think of her, not to wallow in delusion—

He was passing Reception, now crossing the lobby brazenly, openly. Cynthia had a faceful of grousing customers— it appeared as though the system had swallowed the reservations of four sixty-ish women— but Eric looked his way.

And in that moment, Rippner thought of that video clip, eight minutes long. Erik the Viking, headless on-screen. _How easy to make the phrase "headless-for-real."_ Lisa he could let go, forgiveness being part of love, but Eric Janssen meant nothing to Rippner but loathing—

Eric was leaving the desk, coming toward him.

Rippner paused, his face neutral, his shoulders and torso relaxed in his dress shirt, the dark suit jacket in a fabric nearly light enough to withstand the blanketing heat outside. The two knives velcroed into the seams of that jacket, one on each side, polycarbonate blades slender and invisible to airline scanners.

"Hello— Jackson, isn't it?" Eric offered Rippner his hand and a smile as broad and fake as a billboard. "Will she be glad to see you—!"

"Who—?" His expression still neutral, Rippner accepted the handshake.

"Reisert, of course. She should be down any minute—"

"Security says she's gone home."

"No— My fault—" —and Eric's smile became sheepish. "She's smoothing feathers upstairs. One of the senior suites— fourteen oh eight, I think. Regular shitstorm: I couldn't handle it. She should be down any time now, though."

He glanced toward the desk, where a new batch of customers— in addition to Cynthia's pecking quartet— was coming to full swarm. "Oh, wow. I'd better— Excuse me. Good to see you, Jackson."

Rippner nodded. _You're dead,_ he thought. He watched Eric rejoin Cynthia at the desk.

Then he walked to the far elevator bank, entered a car, and pressed the button for the fourteenth floor.

#####

####

No sound from behind the door. Fourteen oh eight, the suite from hell. Absolutely silent. Into the card reader, Rippner slotted his all-access Visa, his master-key. The locking light flashed green. He pressed the handle downward and entered.

She was buttoning her blouse. Soft auburn curls on off-white silk. Her back to him. Head bowed, her upper arms shaking. No doubt her hands were shaking, too.

"Hello, Lisa," he said.

She seemed to shrink in on herself. Her strong lean back, the clean line of her shoulders: all tightened. But she finished dressing before she turned around.

When she did, it was no longer the pressure dropping or one of the world's oldest cliches: the sight of her took his breath away. She was that beautiful. He'd been that worried; he'd missed her that much. For a second, he forgot all the ignored messages, thought there had to be an explanation for that video—

And then she asked, coldly: "What the fuck are you doing here, Jackson?"

Rippner took a deep, slow breath. Exhaled.

#####

He asked gently: "What happened, Lisa?"

"I woke up, Mr. Rippner." She kept her distance, but she met his eyes. As fearless as she'd ever been. "I woke up. I came to my senses. You're a loser, Jackson. A pathetic loser. You're a psychopathic, delusional stalker—"

"Fine. That's fine." He took one step, two, farther into the suite. As far as he could see, they were alone. A table lamp, a metal skeleton, modern and elegantly functional, lit the sitting room where they stood; in the bedroom to Rippner's right, the bulbs of both bedside lamps were glowing. The bed itself was unmade. "Stop with the name-calling. I haven't heard from you in two weeks. I've been worried. What happened, Lise—?"

"What could I possibly see in you?" Lightning froze Lisa in split-second silhouette against the floor-to-ceiling window at her back. A moment later, thunder shook the filtered glass. "What could _any_ woman see in you? You've got nothing but your ego—"

"I'm trying to stay calm here."

"So _lose it,_ Jackson. You treat me like a child or a possession. You're selfish, you're patronizing, you're shitty in bed—"

"And who— let me guess: Eric's better."

"Believe it or not, he is."

She held her ground as he came closer. Rippner felt a rigor-mortis twitch in the muscle of his left cheek. "He has more to offer, I suppose."

"A normal life? A career that doesn't involve killing people? Yes. And he's not—"

"Not what—?"

"Sterile."

"You know that for a fact. Right now, this very second, you know that."

"Yes."

She kept her eyes level as his strayed to her belly. A mere arm's length between them now. Rippner chewed his lower lip thoughtfully. His voice was toneless: "Your profile indicates you dislike children nearly as much as I do."

"I'm not a fucking profile, _Jack_."

The knuckles of his open left hand caught her across the face hard enough to knock her to the floor. He grabbed her by the hair, dragged her into the bedroom. He pinned her on her back on the rumpled bed, straddled her. He unsheathed a knife.

"I'd like to tell you it'll only hurt for a second."

She glared up at him through tear-filled eyes. Tears, autonomic, in response to pain, not fear. The blow might have stunned her, but even now she wasn't afraid of him. He loved her for that. She was panting beneath him. Lips parted, blood on her teeth.

"But you never lie," she said.

He cocked his head, his own lips twitching. Smirk or smile, undecided. Something she'd said to him just over a month ago, on a rainy night in London: he echoed it now. "I'm so damn bad at it, remember—?"

He blanketed her with his body. His torso in his suit jacket like a black wing spreading over her. He nuzzled her cheek, his lips close to her ear, and before she could struggle or bite he rammed the blade of the knife into her side.

Her eyes went wide. She gasped, first, sharply, in pain, then in disbelief: she could breathe death no more than she might breathe water. She was staring past Rippner's shoulder as he pushed up her skirt, as he unfastened his trousers.

#####

Rape and murder. Or murder and rape. She was still alive when he began. Her blood stained his shirt. Afterward, he nuzzled her neck. Dragged his incisors against the skin of her throat. He closed her eyes, kissed her eyelids, left then right, and sat up. He straightened and smoothed her skirt for her. Then he remained where he was, looking down at her face.

Breathing. His breath, alone, drawing and releasing the chill conditioned air.

#####

The temptation after committing a crime, any crime, not just a crime of violence, is to run. Rippner got off of Lisa, off of the bed, finished re-fastening his trousers as he entered the bathroom. He left the door open as he washed his hands. He took his time. The blood on his shirt wouldn't be noticeable under his jacket. Not in the time it would take him to reach his Hertz BMW on this stormy night, the first of the rain now hail-pelting the windows of the suite. His DNA was all over Lisa's body, on the bed, the tap, the towel. No matter. He was practically invisible now. Tomorrow he would no longer exist.

Leaving the bathroom, switching off the light (another meaningless trace of him, _himself_), he looked once more toward the bed, the body lying backflat there, and crossed to the door of the suite. As he touched the door handle, his phone trilled softly from the breast pocket of his suit jacket.

He paused, still looking toward the bedroom. As if she could be the one calling._ Stay with me, Jackson._—

— a dozen nights in England, in Scotland, dizzy with pleasure, virtually blind with lust, safe and warm and happy—

He took his hand from the door handle, answered his phone. "Hello."

_Hello, Mr. Rippner._ A voice, vocoded; male or female, he couldn't tell—

_You've made a terrible mistake._

_#####_


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** ... with unofficial thanks to Florence and the Machine for the album _Lungs_. Practically a ready-made "Lux" popera. And thanks, too, to all y'all for putting up with this nonsense....

*****

*****

At the door, Rippner asked, hoping for the honesty of an off-guard response: "Who is this?"

Replied the vocoded voice: _You're wondering whether the police will be waiting for you downstairs._

Rippner looked toward the bedroom. No sound, no motion. Lisa lay where he could no longer see her, invisible and still, beyond the reach of the gut-shake thunder and the rain now hitting the window like pebbles or lead shot. "We're a little outside the response window for the Miami police."

_Not if they were tipped off._

But the security staff of the Lux itself hadn't been tipped off. Otherwise, Julie Weber would simply have detained him when she spotted him in the lobby. Again Rippner asked: "Who is this--?"

_Why don't you ask Miss Reisert?_

Rippner reached for the door handle. "That would be difficult."

_I think not--_

Applying the first downward pressure to the door handle, Rippner snorted softly. "I doubt we'll be rooming in the same part of the afterlife."

_There's blood on the carpet, Mr. Rippner._

The first grease-on-metal slither of the bearing in the door lock. "I'll notify housekeeping when I get to the lobby," Rippner said. One second to push the handle all the way down, two more to step into the hallway and freedom--

-- and he found himself standing stock-still, the door handle unturned, when the voice said: _You're bleeding_.

How stupid would an interior designer have to be to put cream-colored carpeting in the most heavily trafficked area of a hotel room? Rippner looked at the trail of blood drops, nearly black in the dim light, leading back to the bedroom. Droplets stippled the carpeting around his feet.

_Tell her she failed, Jackson._

And he knew whose voice he was hearing. She'd had a flight to catch. South, to an assassination that would barely count as a blip on CNN's blood-hungry radar.

The line went dead. Rippner returned his phone to his breast pocket and turned away from the door. He walked back to the bedroom, the blood on the carpet smearing beneath the soles of his shoes.

*****

Minutes ago, pinning Lisa with his body, his lips close to her ear, he had whispered four words: "Lie still. Trust me."

No rape. No penetration. The violence, the motion, the nearness: all necessary to create an illusion, a visual lie for whoever had to be watching.

Now Rippner seated himself beside Lisa on the bed, leaned close, pressed his lips to hers. He tasted her blood when he did. He said, his voice nearly a whisper: "Gig's up, Lise."

She opened her eyes, lake-storm blue in her pale face. For a long moment, she looked up at him as if she were assessing his reality. "I tried to call you. I left messages."

"So did I."

She sat up, and Rippner wrapped her in his arms. Breath shuddered from her; she held him tightly. She said to his shoulder: "It's Rosemary Wheeler. She was here."

"I know. Did she hurt you--?"

Lisa drew back just far enough to look at his face. "How did you know?"

"Besides my doctor, only two people in the world know about my vasectomy. One is my sister; the other is Rosemary." Rippner caressed her cheek. "And you would never pick a fight with me like that. Break a vase over my head, maybe. Knock me out, sure. But petty slurs? Cheating? Not your style, baby."

Lisa kissed the corner of his mouth, then let her cheek rest against his. Her lips now close to his ear, she whispered, "There's a bomb in the hotel."

Rippner said, more as a test than anything: "Then we have to call down, get Security to start evacuating--"

"No. No calls. That's what she said."

Rippner frowned. He released her, turned to examine the bedside phone set. As he did, as his suit jacket fell open, Lisa gasped--

"Jackson--"

He looked over his shoulder at her. "What?"

Lisa's eyes were filling with tears. She took him by the shoulders, turned him gently to face her. Rippner let her open his jacket wide, let her see the slash there, through the cloth, the skin below. The blood soaking to purple the pale blue of his dress shirt. Lisa's hand went to her mouth.

"Oh, my God--"

He said, softly: "The blood had to come from somewhere, Lise."

When he straddled her, when he unsheathed his left-side knife, his right hand going under his jacket to unstrap the downward-hanging handle, he pulled the blade free and cut himself across the midriff. That simple. That painful. The anger on his face absorbed the wince and the shock; he swung the knife out in a tight arc and savagely stabbed the mattress below Lisa's back.

There were cameras in the room. She liked her video, Rosemary did.

"It's not deep. It's not bleeding heavily." He took Lisa gently by the chin, drew her eyes to his, away from his cut belly. "You had to be dead, right? Am I right?"

Her own blouse and torso, stained with blood. His, not hers. She nodded. A tear broke free and ran down her cheek. Rippner caught it with the edge of his thumb.

"Yes."

He turned back to the phone, looked down at it from above, from behind, knelt on the floor to see it from the side. "What exactly did she say to you, Lisa?"

A hair-thin wire, barely visible in the low light, ran from the battery compartment of the handset to the phone's base. Thunder rumbled the hotel's floors and joints; looking at that thought-thin wire, Rippner for a second held his breath.

Lisa looked where he was looking. "She took my phone. Can we use yours--?"

In reply, Rippner straightened, left the bedroom, crossed to the door of the suite. Lisa followed him. He met her eyes, nodded to the left side of the door. While Rippner examined the hinges, she, the seasoned Lux employee, examined the frame on the closing edge, the handle, the lock.

"Jackson: here."

Two tiny contacts, poised facing one another in the space to the left of the door handle. The motion of the locking bolt drawing back would pull them together.

Rippner took out his phone, looked at it. He could call the front desk. He could call the police.

_No calls._

Rosemary-- or someone working for her-- had been intercepting his calls for two weeks. Lisa's, too. His phone was compromised. He left it turned off, put it back in his pocket, scanned the sitting room.

"The bomb's here, Lisa. We have to find it--"

Beside him, Lisa swayed, put her hands to her temples. Rippner grasped her shoulder, steadied her.

"I'm so sorry I hit you--"

"It's not that. You've showed me how to take a punch." Happier days, rowdier, less deadly days, sharing gym time weeks back. She closed her eyes, frowned. He could feel her trembling; he could feel her trying to will some of the pain from herself. "I've had a headache all day, Rosemary gave me something-- I'm fine. I'll be fine."

She opened her eyes, smiled for him. Not quite the smile that betokened that all had no choice but to be well with the world, but brave enough; it would do.

Especially if they weren't blown to bits.

Rippner smiled slightly for her in return, released her.

"Tell me exactly what happened in here, Lisa," he said, as he started to search the sitting room.

*****

"Let's get right to the point: I don't want him, but you can't have him," Rosemary Wheeler said, as she motioned Lisa into the sitting room with the gun. Yet another snub-nosed Walther, this one in matte black. She continued, conversationally: "Did he tell you about his vasectomy...?"

Lisa heard the door shut behind her. The soft, heavy _whunk_ of the door itself in the frame, the jewel-like click of the casters as the lock set. She should have known from the quiet before she entered that something well beyond the average panoply of luxury complaints was wrong in the suite.

She looked Rosemary in the eye. "Are you going to break my nose now?"

Wheeler looked back at her just as levelly. "You love him, don't you?"

Lisa didn't reply. The lights were low in the suite; she could see flashes of lightning like distant carbon-arc lamps through the filtered glass of the floor-to-ceiling window.

"C'mon, 'fess up. It's just us girls." Rosemary cast a nod and a shark's smile toward the piano in the room. A golden-brown Baldwin baby grand. On the right-hand corner of the keyboard cover sat a highball glass half-full of what looked like plain water. "Drink it. It'll loosen you up."

Looking at the glass, Lisa hesitated.

"It's not toxic." Wheeler leveled the pistol at Lisa's throat. "Not nearly as toxic as a bullet, anyway. Drink it."

Lisa walked to the piano; there, surreally, a little ludicrously, she found herself noticing that the glass was leaving a condensation ring on the polished maple. She lifted the glass, wiped the water from the keyboard cover with the edge of her hand, and drank the clear liquid. Slightly bitter, slightly sweet. Not unlike Alka Seltzer. A hint of salt to the scent. She found herself trying to remember if it was arsenic or cyanide that was said to smell of almonds.

"In five minutes, Lisa, you're going to take a nap." Rosemary moved to the sofa, a very primary-colors peacock blue, had a seat. The muzzle of the Walther stayed trained on Lisa. "Before then, I want to propose a simple trade."

Whatever had been in the glass: whatever it was, even if it was only the water in the mix, was taking the edge off the throbbing in Lisa's skull. She nearly smiled at the relief. But her legs were getting shorter. She could feel it. Either that, or the floor was rising beneath her feet. She sat down on the piano bench. "What--?"

"Your beloved hotel and Jackson, too, safe and sound. In return for one tiny, insignificant thing: your life."

Lisa couldn't turn her head toward Wheeler and the sofa. Not without tipping off the piano bench. She asked the room's cream carpeting instead: "How--?"

"He's going to kill you." Rosemary relaxed against the cushions. "You might wonder why. Well, if there are two things Jackson absolutely hates, it's people who don't return his calls and women who fuck around on him."

"But I called him. He never got back to me." Was she speaking out loud? Lisa couldn't quite tell. The carpet, which seemed to be coming closer, didn't indicate one way or the other. "And he knows I would never--"

"Cheat on him? Oh, dear. If there's one thing worse than a man who thinks he's God's gift to women, it's a man who's right about it." Rosemary got up. "Nearly time for me to go. Final details-- can you hear me, Lisa--?"

Lisa nodded.

"There's a bomb in the hotel. A very large bomb." She picked Lisa's purse from the floor where Lisa had let it fall, when she lurched onto the piano bench, dug for and found Lisa's phone, and dropped the purse again to the carpet. "Don't call out. Don't try to leave the room. And when Jackson gets here-- Lisa, look at me."

Lisa's skull had octupled in weight. She had to tip her shoulders back to look high enough to see Wheeler's face.

"If you don't die, the bomb goes off."

From a distance, Lisa felt her eyes tearing up. "But he won't-- How can I make him--"

Rosemary gripped Lisa's jaw, twisted her face up until they were seeing one another eye to drugged eye. "Just sell it."

She released her, took three steps back, then turned to go--

"Oh: one other thing--" She turned back. "Get up, Lisa."

Lisa pressed the soles of her shoes against the carpet in motion, gripped the piano case, straightened her legs. Stood, though she didn't quite know how she managed it.

"Unbutton your blouse," said Rosemary Wheeler. Her eyes glittered like mica in the next flash of lightning. "I want to see if I got it right."

*****

"Why would she say that? I passed out five seconds later--" Lisa was searching the sitting room while Rippner took the bathroom and bedroom. "Got _what_ right--?"

Rippner, checking the walls inside the bedroom closet, felt his stomach twist. An eight-minute video on an amateur porn site. Lisa-- or a double convincing enough to fool even him, or even him through a haze of idiotic frustration and jealousy-- and Erik the Viking, doing extraordinarily obscene things. Rosemary Wheeler was a mistress of disguise. Even at full-frontal level, as it now turned out. He found nothing in the closet, moved, a little ironically, to the bed. "Afraid she and Eric Janssen have been busy, Lisa."

"What? What do you mean--?"

"Just a second." The headboard, the nightstands. He lowered himself to the floor, winced in pain as the tear in his gut-skin stretched, looked under the bed. Nothing.

Then he looked at the underside of the bed itself.

"Holy shit," he said.

*****

"I'm going to kill him," Lisa said. "She and him. _Her_ and him-- whatever. Both of them."

The mattress was the bomb. It was the largest chunk of C-4 Rippner had ever seen. Certainly the only king-sized pillow-topped one, at any rate. Lisa was sitting on one of the bedroom's modern red-cushioned chairs, watching him locate the wire-cutter in a Leatherman multi-tool. He'd found the detonator, at the right-side foot of the bed, pulled up the bedspread, a tasteful riot of white-black-gray geometrics, so they could have a clear look at the faceplate and timer set flush against the bed-sized charge.

The timer was, of course, counting down. Digital red on black. _8:49_. Likely Rosemary had started it at or around _15:00, _shortly after Rippner "resurrected" Lisa.

"Tell you what: we'll flip for it." No screws on the faceplate. Black plastic, plastic clip hinges. "Go in the bathroom and shut the door, Lisa. Duck down in the bathtub, put your arms around your head."

"If that goes off, half the hotel will vaporize. Am I right?"

"Yes."

She stayed where she was. Rippner hooked his fingertips under the hinges and pulled.

_Click_.

_Click_.

The faceplate came off in his hands.

"Let me guess," he said, as he peered into the workings of the detonator. "Renovations on this floor in the last two weeks--"

"-- and Eric oversaw all of it: yes. New bedframes in several of the suites, new mattresses--"

"-- including this beauty here." Not much to see, really. Modern bomb-making had little of the clockwork charm of yore. Mostly chips, circuit boards, touches of solder. A step to either evolutionary side, and you'd have a cell phone or a PC. "Talk about setting the stage for an earth-shattering orgasm."

Lisa laughed, despite herself. "Jackson--"

He smiled slightly, too. _If we have to go, we might as well go together._ A bit more digging, feather-light prodding.

Two wires. One red, one blue. He went still, the wire-cutter of the Leatherman open in his hand.

Lisa joined him, knelt beside him on the floor. It was as if he had breathed her nearer. The timer was passing 5:47.

For both of them, she asked: "Which one--?"

"Red for stop, for death, for blood, for life," Rippner murmured. "Blue eyes, blue sky, freedom, heaven--"

He clamped the blue wire with the cutters, watched as Lisa did as the plastic coating dimpled between the blades--

He paused. The blades where they were, the wire uncut.

"Or the one that gets you that you just don't see."

"That's a misplaced modifier," Lisa said, absently.

"The Moody Blues, Lise. Rosemary has absolutely archaic taste in music. Even by my standards." Rippner looked more closely, more carefully, into the guts of the detonator.

There.

In the upper right-hand corner, above the clock, half-hidden behind a piece of circuit board: a second blue wire. Rippner reached in with the Leatherman and cut it.

The timer kept running. _4:59_.

"Jackson--"

Rippner stared, as she was staring, at the flickering, descending numbers. "She's fucking with us now, Lisa."

"Are you sure--?"

For a second, he thought _No_. He found himself fighting an almighty urge to cut the other blue wire. Then he said, and believed himself: "I know her."

_4:45._

Lisa seated herself on the floor. Rippner folded the Leatherman, put it in the pocket of his suit coat, seated himself beside her. If the bomb were disarmed, the phone and the door were likely safe now, too. And if the detonator were still truly live, there was no time, none at all, to evacuate anyway. Their shoulders touching, they sat and watched the time count down like a couple gazing into a hearth fire.

"Why--?" she asked.

"Why what?"

"The vasectomy."

"I've never liked kids. I have no interest in leaving a gene trail, and not only one that could come back to haunt me professionally." Rippner frowned at the counter without really seeing it. Thunder shook the building, and they might have been alone on the moon. "Does this mean we're, umm-- that you're not interested in--"

"What?"

"I know it's early days for us, Lise, but--"

Her tone was noticeably more focused. "You think I only want you so I can get a baby out of you--?"

"Technically, that's a smidgen impossible, but--"

"You just assumed I want kids."

_4:10._

"Well, uh-- women do tend to want-- I thought that you might--"

"You sexist jerk." She drew her thighs toward her chest, wrapped her arms around her knees. "A woman can't be complete without a baby--?"

Rippner watched the shrinking numbers. "Lise--"

"I can't just love you for you, or us for us--?"

"Lisa." He took his eyes from the timer, _2:35_ burning in digital red on his brain. He nuzzled her cheek. "Does your head still hurt?"

"Yes," she said, more softly.

"Might we continue this later?"

She looked away from the timer, too. "When we're not about to die?"

"I was going to say after you've had a couple Excedrin and a cold glass of water, but sure."

"Okay."

She tipped her head against his shoulder. Rippner put his arm around her. He was still bleeding, but his wound had found a comfortable place for itself. No burning, no stinging. For now, anyway. Maybe forever.

"And I really wanted that prototype Z4," he said, wistfully. "Then I let Rose take a turn driving, and she wrapped the damn thing around a tree."

"They gave you a car in exchange for a vasectomy?"

"Sterilization bonus. Hundred thousand dollars, something like that."

Lisa looked back at the timer. Rippner did, too. _1:12_. "She's a bitch, isn't she?" she said.

"It's beginning to dawn on me, yes."

"I love you, Jackson."

"I love you, too, Lisa."

She released her knees, shifted closer to him. Rippner let his cheek come to rest against her hair. He closed his eyes, breathed with her, heard her breathe with him. He felt her, he sensed her with every fiber of his being, and he could see the timer running in his mind--

_00:03._

_00:02._

_00:01--_

*****

*****


	3. Chapter 3

Rippner sat in the darkness behind his eyelids, with Lisa next to him, as at peace as he'd ever been, as tranquil in his heart and mind as a man with a bleeding stomach wound who was about to be blown up could be. In those final seconds he was tense but content.

Time slowed. They were approaching singularity. He knew that should he open his eyes, the timer would read _00:01_. It would then read _00:00,_ and in half a heartbeat, a quarter of a shared breath, in a flash of light preceding a shockwave they wouldn't even feel, he and Lisa and half this side of the Lux would cease to be.

He opened his eyes.

He looked at the timer on the detonator, and he was never more glad to be wrong.

*****

No more numbers stick-flickering in red. The display was black and still.

*****

They got to their knees, a bit wobbly, a bit stiff; before they got to their feet, Lisa stopped him, the fingers of her right hand gripping his left bicep through his suit jacket and shirt. She smiled for him then, widely and wildly, all the pain in her head and her struck cheek seemingly forgotten for this one moment when she had never been more perfectly alive. Rippner found himself grinning back at her, feeling giddy himself, and not just from the rock-bottom atmospheric pressure or the fact that he was losing blood, and then Lisa was kissing him, and he was kissing her, and she was pulling him closer, and he had his hands on her then, too, and how easy it would be to stay down there on the good if idiotically light-colored carpeting, thunder shaking the hotel and lightning bursting like flashbulbs in the blackness outside the bedroom windows, to hell with bleeding and bombs, just for a minute or two or five, and celebrate the simple fact that they weren't dead. God, how they'd missed one another, the two of them, her body and his, too; they were at that terrible, wonderful stage of their relationship when surrender was spontaneous, nearly instantaneous--

But: no.

He paused. Stopped. (Still feeling the softness, the warmth, of her lips on his, the taste of her mouth, the sweet hormonal intoxication of her, lingering on his tongue.) He calmed his breathing; she calmed hers. All the while their eyes shared disappointment. Adoration, too.

_Later,_ he thought. _There'll be a later._ Still, right then, still catching his breath, he almost couldn't resist one more kiss--

Lisa actually spoke first: "Is it over?"

"No." Rippner caressed her face, saw the apprehension register in her eyes. It was as if they were linked: thoughts, feelings, traveling straight from his head and heart to hers. "Right about now, Rosemary's calling her backup."

He got up, offered Lisa a hand. She took it, stood. Rippner tried the bedside phone: the keypad lit up, but the handset produced no dial tone. He led the way out through the sitting room, opened the front door of the suite, checked the hallway to either side. No one around. Beneath a trundling of thunder, silence seemed to press in from the walls. Rosemary might well have booked the entire floor. He turned to Lisa.

"Get to the lobby," he said. "Contact Julie Weber; call the cops; evacuate."

"What will you do?"

"Hand-to-hand combat isn't Rosemary's strong suit. I'll stay here and wait for the repairman."

"Guard the bomb, you mean."

"The irony isn't lost on me, Lisa." Once he tried to blow the place up; now he was trying to stop someone else from doing the very same thing. He started to take off his suit jacket, then paused, feeling sweat break out on his forehead, as his wound twinged sharply. "Here," he said, shrugging free of the jacket and reaching it around Lisa's shoulders.

She realized without asking: he was trying to conceal the blood on her blouse. She slid her arms into the sleeves of the jacket, watched Rippner with affectionate concern as he tugged the shoulders into place for her, straightened the lapels.

Before she left, he reached inside the jacket and unvelcroed one of his knives in its scabbard. He took his Leatherman and his phone, too. Without his jacket, it was easier to see: he was bleeding more heavily than he had wanted her to believe. Lisa looked for a long moment at his bloody torso. Then she took his face in her hands and kissed him, one last time, tenderly, on the lips.

"I'll be right back," she said.

"Be careful."

He watched her leave. Fourteen oh eight was the corner suite: she moved away quickly, keeping close to the wall. The hallway palette was art deco by way of the Sunshine State: burnished golds and greens, highlights in sky blue and rose. Not shadowy, but not overlit either.

Twenty feet away, Lisa turned the corner and disappeared. Rippner shut the door of the suite. He leaned against it for a moment, panting. The endorphins keyed to relief, to love and desire, were draining from his system. Now the cut across his midriff felt raw, exposed. He went to the bathroom, wet a towel with cold water, groaned as he pressed it to his stomach.

Then, still carrying the towel, he took out the Leatherman and crossed the sitting room to the piano.

*****

Though she heard nothing within, Lisa knocked on the door of suite 1406: as she anticipated, no one answered. She tried 1404 and 1402, quickly, on her way to the stairs. Jackson had said nothing, and neither did she; their agreement was simple and silent: the elevators would be too much of a risk. Outside the stairwell, she pulled the handle on the wall-mounted fire alarm: nothing.

Into the stairwell she went. One floor, two. Forty-eight steps down. On ten, a crack of thunder shot like a meteorite down the stairwell and the lights went out. She waited for the emergency power to kick in, listened. No sounds of panic from the hotel, but she could hear whooping and laughing. She was next to one of the spring-break groups.

The emergency lighting came on, flat, somewhat horizon-free. She continued down the stairs.

Then she heard the echo of footsteps just a beat off from hers, and she froze.

And the footsteps stopped, half a beat late.

Lisa listened. Softened her breath. Leaned out cautiously and looked down the narrow chasm between the slender steel banisters in the stairwell.

Someone was looking back up at her.

A second's glimpse of a rugged man's face, close-cut blonde hair. Maybe three floors down. She pulled back, shocked. Just then, the regular lighting came back on. She descended as quickly as she could to the next landing—the ninth floor—and exited the stairs.

Just before the door closed behind her, as she stepped out into the north hall on nine, she again heard the second set of footsteps. Ascending.

*****

Doors were open in the hallway to the left. A peopling of college kids outside their rooms, some sitting, some standing, laughing and talking. Open bottles of beer, plastic cups. Lisa's initial, instinctive reaction was to go into cop mode—half to all of them looked to be underage, and they shouldn't have been using the halls as party space. Instead, she put on a smile and plunged in—

Greetings, invitations. Two beefy guys with the beginnings of epic sunburns pointed her toward the room with the booze. 918. A bathtub full of cans and bottles and ice cubes. A keg, for God's sake. Between that and a hundred pounds of C-4 upstairs, what couldn't people get into this damn hotel? The TV on, competing with a CD player from across the hall. The bedroom noisily in use. In the beer cave, the phone had been pressed accidentally into service as a remote by two boys in shorts and tank tops, sitting on the floor before _Kill Bill_ in widescreen on pay-per-view. Uma Thurman and a cast of dozens, rendered starkly in black and white. Blood spraying across the forty-inch television image, severed heads and limbs a-twirl in the celluloid air. From one of the kids watching the carnage, a whack of the handset on the carpeted floor. "Fucking thing's broke...!" Lisa proceeded to the next room with an open door, grabbed the handset from the nearest phone, called Security. No answer. Her headache was reviving in the din; she couldn't remember Julie Weber's pager number. She called the front desk. Three rings--

_Front desk, Cynthia speaking._

"Cynthia, thank God—"

_Lisa--? You're calling from inside the building? I thought you went home._

"No—Cynthia, listen: Jackson and I were in 1408—"

_Lisa, that is_ **so** _against company policy_—

"No, no, no: it's not—we weren't—Cynthia, listen--"

_Could you hold, Lisa? We're absolutely swamped_--

"Wait, Cynthia: there's a—"

The connection went to "hold." Music. "The Girl from Ipanema," of all things.

Lisa hung up, re-dialed—

_Front desk._

Eric Janssen's voice. Lisa kept quiet--

_Is that you, Reisert? Where are you-- ah, nine-twelve. We'll send someone right up_.

_Click_.

Lisa set down the phone, half-bolted for the door-- and collided with a young man coming in with a red plastic cup in his hand. She gasped as what had to have been a full pint of ice-cold beer spilled down her front.

"Wow: sorry--!" The bringer of the flood looked down at her, college-handsome, cheerily drunk. His hazel eyes left her face. He looked lower. He _stared_--

-- as Lisa wondered why in God's name she'd chosen to wear a blouse in white that day, and not only that: white _silk_--

-- and something changed in the kid's expression. "Shit--" He frowned uncertainly at Lisa's torso. "Is that _blood_--?"

"Excuse me." She pushed her way around him, scraped past the door frame, and ran for the stairs at the south end of the hall.

*****

Back in 1408, Rippner kept busy.

First, he found and broke the cameras in the sitting room: two of them, one mounted near a wall sconce to the left of the entryway, the other concealed near the door hinges of the room's entertainment center.

Then, at the piano, he folded the wet towel in half, laid it across the bass-level strings in the open case, and severed four of the longest ones with the Leatherman's wirecutter. The towel kept the ends from springing free, snapping up, cutting his face or taking out an eye. He removed the free-form-modern paintings from the walls behind the room's two sofas, from above the bed, cannibalized the bolts from the mounting brackets, and, twisting the bolts into the walls with the one of the Leatherman's screwdriver heads and brute force, strung two tripwires in the entryway: one just past the inswing of the door, the second eighteen inches farther than that. With the multi-tool's three-inch saw, he hacked up a chunk of carpeting between the two, a rough tripping-spot. He removed the bulbs from the entryway lights, then strung a third piece of wire at throat level at the inside end of the entryway. Then came the fourth piece of piano string. Lisa had seen him ugly; she didn't need to see this: a garrote. He was twisting and tying an eighteen-inch length of the wire through two fist-width pieces of shower-curtain rod when his phone trilled.

Rippner paused in his work to answer it. "Yes?"

Rosemary Wheeler said, her voice clear of the vocoder:_ Just walk away. Jackson. All you have to do is leave the building, get in your rental car, and drive back to the airport._

Rippner found himself looking toward the broken camera near the entryway. "Why do I have the feeling, Miss Wheeler, that the hotel will blow up, and mine will be the face on the recovered security tapes?"

_This much concern for a bunch of cops, old ladies, and college kids, Jackson?_

"We were college kids once, Rosie. Come on: hundreds of people could die here. And all because you think I'm picking the wrong girl?"

_I thought you liked grand gestures._

"I like grand gestures better when they serve a purpose and when I'm getting paid for them. Look, Rose, I'm very busy right now--"

_I understand. Booby-traps to set, blood to lose. Later, darling?_

"Fine." Rippner hung up.

*****

Lisa, stinking of beer, escaped from the frat floor to the south stairs. She leaned out over the steel railing before she started down, checked above and below. She descended. One flight, two. Then, as she passed the door stenciled "LUX ATL. 6," she heard a stairwell door opening below. She stopped, looked down, saw a twenty-something sandy-haired man, wearing a security uniform, in the stairwell below five. She was about to call down to him when he took a walkie-talkie from his belt and said into it: "No sign of her. Continuing down."

Lisa stood very still--

_Copy that_. Eric's voice, brittle over the walkie's speaker, echoing up the stairs.

Seven steps back to the sixth-floor landing. Lisa started to climb, willing her shoes silent on the rubberized safety-tread of the stairs. No sound from below. The man in the security uniform hadn't left the stairwell. He wasn't moving.

Was he _listening_?

Lisa paused with her hand on the handle of the door to the sixth floor. One breath. Two.

And then: footsteps from below.

Descending.

Lisa opened the door, left the stairwell. She looked left, then turned right: with both stairwells compromised, she might as well try for the elevators, bold as brass, the main bank, not the rock-star express (Eric would likely have someone watching the elevator just inside the lobby's main doors, near the concierge station, reserved for the rich and famous).

She turned right, and collided squarely with a man.

There were two of them, actually. The one Lisa ran into was tall and lean, with pepper-and-salt hair short at the sides, untamed on top, and the sort of mustache that might have been a common sight on wanted posters of the 1880s. His companion was shorter, square-jawed, square-shouldered, his balding hair trimmed neatly against his skull. Both of them wore jeans, big-buckled belts, and checked shirts with the sleeves rolled to their elbows. Each carried an unopened can of Coke; the shorter man had an unopened bag of Funyuns in his hand. Lisa had met them returning from a snack run.

"Whoa, there, missy," said the taller man. He smiled at Lisa, dimples creasing his weathered face. His eyes were brown, sharp, whiskey-wry. He laid a steadying hand on her left shoulder, much, Lisa felt, as he might to calm a skittish horse.

"Excuse me," she said, not quite managing to smile back.

"Pardon my askin', miss--" His hand stayed on her. His eyes, too. Politely. "-- but are you alright?"

"Yes. Thank you." She tried to move away without jerking. They were maybe twenty feet from the elevators. She fought an urge to bolt; she tried, with more success, for a smile. "I need to watch where I'm going."

"No harm done."

He stepped aside to let her pass. As he did, the second man said, "Holy cow, that's blood."

Jackson's jacket had fallen open on the right-hand side. The second man was staring at Lisa's torso.

Lisa looked desperately toward the elevators, calculated her chances of catching an open car. "It's just wine, actually--"

"Smells an awful lot like Budweiser t' me."

She looked at him indignantly. "I don't see how that's any of your--"

He held up a single-fold wallet. A badge and picture identification inside.

"Virgil Carr, miss. Sweetwater, Wyoming, sheriff's department."

Lisa stared at Carr's face on his I.D. card. She'd stepped from the stairwell right onto the home floor for the attendees of the national law-enforcement convention.

"This isn't your jurisdiction," she said, looking from Carr to the first man. "Look: I really need to get to a working phone or to the lobby--"

Virgil Carr glanced sidewise at his partner. "Care t' call it, Roy?"

"Hmm." Roy drew a deep breath, exhaled slowly. His eyes stayed on Lisa, not without sympathy, as he reached in his pocket and took out his own badge. "Royal Prudhomme, miss." He, too, was from the Sweetwater County, Wyoming, sheriff's department. "Think it'd be safer for you if you had a proper escort--"

"Good. Thank you." Lisa smiled in relief. She started for the elevators. "We have to hurry--"

"Hold on." Roy's hand closed on her left forearm. His grip was gentle, but his fingers were like bent railroad spikes. Lisa held up. "'Fraid we didn't make ourselves clear. Virg and I are placin' you under citizen's arrest. Just temporary, mind."

"But you can't--"

"Young woman smellin' strongly of alcohol, covered in what looks t' be blood," Virgil Carr said. He was now leading the way down the corridor, away from the elevators. Roy Prudhomme was following him. Lisa, her arm locked in his casual iron grip, was following, too. "We'd be remiss in our duty if we didn't notify the proper authorities."

He stopped at the door to room 628, took out a key card. Lisa tensed as he opened the door.

"Easy, there," Prudhomme's voice was calm. He said to Carr: "You call Security, Virg, have 'em send someone up. We'll wait out here."

"Wait," Lisa said, before Carr could go for the phone. "I'm management. I work here. Ask for Julie Weber. She's the head of Security. Have her paged. I'll go quietly if they send Julie Weber."

"Right." Virgil glanced at Prudhomme, his blue eyes a shade less than perfectly credulous in his square-jawed face, and entered the room.

"What's your name, miss?" Prudhomme asked, when the door closed behind Carr.

"Lisa. Lisa Reisert."

"Everything's gonna be fine, Lisa."

His tone was almost soothing. His eyes on the blood were professionally neutral. Lisa said: "I have a friend up in fourteen oh eight. He needs help."

Prudhomme frowned slightly. "Is he in need of medical attention, Lisa?"

"Yes--" She caught herself, seeing the look on his face. "No: I didn't hurt him. But he needs a doctor. And there's something else--"

The door opened; Carr rejoined them. "They'll be sending someone along shortly."

Lisa looked from him to Prudhomme. She thought of the knife under her right arm.

"You were saying, Lisa--?" Prudhomme nodded toward her. "This is Lisa Reisert, by the way, Virg."

Virgil Carr nearly touched the brim of a hat that wasn't on his head. "Miss Reisert."

"So, Lisa: you were saying--?"

_These are good men, _Lisa thought. _Decent men._ She felt the weight of the scabbard against her side, wondered if she would have the speed, the will, to free Jackson's knife if Prudhomme released her. _They've never heard of Rosemary Wheeler._ "I know how this looks," she said, "but you need to listen to me--"

Twenty feet away, the elevator doors opened. Two men dressed in the blue uniforms of Lux Atlantic security personnel stepped into the hallway.

One was the sandy-haired man Lisa had seen in the stairwell below the fifth floor. He saw her and smiled; she shrank away--

"We'll take it from here," said the sandy-haired man, approaching. "Thanks for your help, gentlemen."

"Need us to file a report?" Prudhomme asked.

The second man, tall, red-haired, made a show of taking out a pocket-sized notebook and a pen. "If we could get your names and room numbers, that should cover it."

Prudhomme and Carr produced their badge wallets; Lisa asked the two men in security uniforms: "Where's Julie Weber? I asked for her specifically."

"We're here on her authority--"

"I need to see your identification."

The sandy-haired man's cohort tried a patronizing smile. "I'm sure that won't be--"

"Show me your I.D.s," Lisa snapped.

They did. "Those are _fake_," Lisa said, looking. The printing and photos were clear-- the red-haired man was supposedly "David Clemons," his sandy-haired companion was labeled "Mark Conklin"; the barcodes were crisp; but-- "This month's sidebars are gold, not silver--"

"You're distraught, miss." The man called Conklin took her arm.

"Lady says she works here," Prudhomme said, maintaining his own grip on Lisa. "Says she's a manager."

"Not that I've seen." A mock-scrutinizing frown, and then, with more than a hint of irony, Conklin asked: "May I see _your_ I.D., please, miss?"

She'd been on her way home. Hours ago, it seemed. She'd checked in at Security; she'd checked her messages. She'd removed her I.D. and put it in her purse.

Which was where Rosemary Wheeler had dropped it, next to the piano bench in 1408.

Lisa's voice was very small. "I don't have it with me."

As Prudhomme released her to Conklin, Lisa looked desperately at the man from Wyoming. "There's a bomb in fourteen oh eight."

Clemons took her other arm. "Is that in addition to your dead boyfriend, miss?"

"He's not dead--" They were walking her between them now, away from Prudhomme and Carr, toward the elevators. "Wait--" She twisted in their grip, looked again at Prudhomme. "How does he _know_--? How does he know what's going on--?"

And then she and Rosemary Wheeler's two fake security men were aboard the elevator, and the doors slid shut.

*****

Virgil Carr and Royal Prudhomme returned to their room and to the midpoint of a game in progress on a battered pocket chess set opened on the room's round corner table. Prudhomme popped the top of his Coke, took a long drink, reached for a tour brochure to serve as a coaster. He set down the can, drew drops of soda off his mustache with the edge of his thumb, and studied the board.

"Wouldn't take more'n five minutes," he said.

"It's them pretty ones, ain't it?" Carr, seated opposite him, crunched a Funyun slowly between his molars. "Get you every time."

Prudhomme nodded. "No more'n five minutes, up and back."

"Care t' call it, Roy?"

"You take the lobby, see if them fellas actually brought her there. I'll have a look at fourteen oh eight."

"Got it." Carr neatly folded the open top of his yellow Funyuns bag, laid the bag next to the chess set, and stood up again.

*****

In 1408, Rippner waited in the dark. His phone trilled softly. He opened it, said flatly: "Yes."

_Sorry to inform you, Jackson: Lisa didn't quite make it. _Rosemary's voice._ They caught her on six._

"Where is she now?"

_Don't worry: you'll be seeing her soon. Goodbye, darling._

The connection terminated. Rippner listened for a moment to the silence.

"Goodbye, Rose."

Rippner closed his phone, put it back in his pocket.

He was beginning to feel clammy. A shiver tickling across his shoulders, a damp chill reaching between his shoulder blades and pectorals. He slid his knife in its scabbard into the waistband at the front left of his trousers. The waistband was now wet with blood. He gripped the two fist-wide lengths of shower-curtain rod as he stepped to the left of the entryway, the wire strung between the pieces pale silver in the darkness.

A click as the door handle turned. No sound from outside. No mock call of "Room service."

Lightning flashed against the room-wide window across the way. The thunder that followed shook his chest, seemed to compress the air in his lungs. Rippner relaxed and thought of death.

*****

_See you soon, Lisa._

*****

The door opened.

*****


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N:** A dear friend and official muse has instructed me, with her usual grace and tact, to apologize for delaying the resolution of this sterling tale. To wit, she has told me to post this chapter with all due haste, lest she and others find themselves compelled to poke my multitudinous eyeballs with sharp sticks. And so: apologies. And apologies again, for, as a true wit once observed, "It it always darkest just before it turns pitch black." In other words, IT AIN'T OVER YET, KIDS. Thanks for hanging on!

*****

*****

*****

Lisa Reisert stood at the elevator bank on six between Rosemary Wheeler's two hired goons, sandy-headed Conklin, copper-topped Clemons, both of them tidy in their purloined Lux Security uniforms. Conklin waited until the door of the room belonging to Virgil Carr and Roy Prudhomme was securely shut against sounds from the corridor before he took out a cell phone and speed-dialed a number.

"What do you want us to do with her?" he asked Rosemary-- it had to be her on the other end. He listened. "Right."

He put the phone away, pressed the "up" button on the elevator bank.

They had the car to themselves. Conklin punched the button for twelve, and Lisa felt the slightest dusting of relief. If they were going to kill her right then, they'd more likely be taking her to the basement, or outside.

There was a camera in the upper left-hand corner of the car, positioned to shoot down-angle through a tiny gap in the metal-mesh ceiling. Conklin and Clemons didn't seem to notice. Lisa looked directly up at it.

_Help,_ she mouthed. _Twelve._ As if anyone in Security could be sitting and watching the elevator cams on a night this wild. Or anyone watching who wasn't on Rosemary's payroll.

She was still wearing Jackson's jacket, and his second knife was still velcroed against the seam of the lining on the right-hand side, but Conklin and Clemons each had her tightly by an arm. At least they hadn't thought to pat her down. But resignation seeped into her like poison as the car ascended. She'd failed to reach the lobby; she'd failed to get help. And Jackson, already injured and bleeding, was going to be killed. As was she.

Nevertheless, before she died, she had a goal.

She was going to kill Rosemary Wheeler.

*****

The door opened, and a man entered suite 1408.

His name was Anders Vliet. In the dark, Rippner recognized the cropped blonde hair, the pale rugged face. Most of all, he recognized Vliet by his height. The man was huge. Before his booted foot caught on the second tripwire in the entryway, he stood close to six and a half feet tall.

Even after Vliet nearly tripped, taking out with his jacketed chest the "clothesline" wire that would have been throat-high on someone of average height, Rippner practically had to scale him to use the garrote. He jumped the man from behind as Vliet half-stumbled into the suite, scrambled, clamped his legs against Vliet's ribcage; with a segment of shower-curtain-rod handle in each hand, he flipped the wire of the garrote over the man's head and around his throat and pulled. Vliet thrashed, clawing at his neck. Then he snapped his upper body forward, bending sharply at the waist, and Rippner flew over his head.

An unreal moment: being airborne, free of gravity. He saw with perfect clarity the knife in its scabbard drop free of the waistband of his trousers and bounce onto the floor. Then his back impacted the suite's wall-wide window with lung-compressing force, and for one horrible, vertiginous second Rippner saw, upside-down, the ground and the hotel's swimming pool a hundred and fifty feet below.

But his build was only a few pounds heavier than "slight," and the glass was thick, and the window held. Rippner slumped to the floor, landing half on his left shoulder, half on his head. He tried to get up, holding on to the piano; the lid slammed shut over the cannibalized strings. His knife was ten feet away--

And suddenly his feet wouldn't stay beneath him. He stumbled, fell to his knees, gasping.

Vliet didn't charge him. His eyes adjusting to the low light, he saw the blood covering Rippner's torso; he saw the panic, the lack of coordination, the desperation in the smaller man's movements. He saw no other weapons in Rippner's hands.

Rosemary Wheeler hired him to keep a bomb in good repair. She hired him to kill, not to torture. He was not by nature a cruel man.

"It's all over, Rippner," he said, straightening, letting the garrote fall to the floor. "Just relax now."

*****

Downstairs, Virgil Carr crossed the lobby. No sign of Lisa Reisert or the security guys who were supposed to be bringing her down from the sixth floor. There was a press of people near the reception desk. He pardoned his way through the crowd, cut in line, bellied up to the desk.

Two people were working Reception, a very pretty red-headed girl who looked maybe a minute short of what Virgil's ex-wife used to call a "class-A freakout," and a big, burly guy with a rust-colored buzz-cut. The man's nametag read "Eric Janssen."

"Excuse me, Mr. Janssen," Virgil said, with an apologetic this'll-only-take-a-minute smile for the fiftyish tanned bottle-blonde Eric was waiting on. "I'm looking for someone—"

"I'm sorry, sir: I'm with another customer." As he spoke, Eric kept his eyes on the computer screen showing the woman's check-in details. He discreetly pointed Virgil away from the desk. "The concierge can have your friend paged—"

"You don't understand: Security brought her down here."

"You can take it up with the concierge, sir."

"She said she was management."

"Sir—"

Virgil took out his badge. Eric went still, looking at it.

"Said her name was Lisa Reisert," Virgil said.

"Lisa--?" Janssen's desk-partner looked over. Per her tag, she was Cynthia Schreiber. She had big hazel eyes, the kind that registered everything. Right now they were broadcasting a mixture of surprise and worry. "What was she doing with Security--?"

"It's what they were doing with her that I'm interested in, miss." Virgil kept his eyes on Eric. "Lady was in a bit of a state. If you could just tell me what's become of her, I would appreciate it."

"Eric, what's going on? Excuse me just a moment--" Cynthia offered a conciliatory smile to the haggard-looking gray-haired man whose check-in she was processing, then eased closer and had her own look at Virgil's I.D.

Eric was beginning to look uncomfortable. "I think Lisa suffered some kind of mental break up on six. You had her on the phone, Cynthia, right? Sounded like there was something wrong with her. I had Security walk her out."

"'Something wrong'?" Virgil frowned at him. "Son, her clothes were messed up, and she was a mite upset, but she seemed lucid to me."

"Who walked her out?" This from Cynthia. "I didn't see anyone—"

"You were busy, Cynthia; they took her out the side entrance."

"Look, Eric, I might be short of clues, but I'm not an idiot. I would have noticed."

"I'm sorry. I thought it best to keep it quiet."

"Does Julie know?"

"Would that be Julie Weber?" Virgil asked Cynthia. He nodded toward Eric. "Flat-top here said she wasn't available when I called down."

Eric looked at him coldly. "She was handling an incident on five." He sounded like he was reading the words off a cue card. "Someone reported a firearm—"

Virgil leaned in close and said, very quietly, out of hearing of the customers near the desk: "Lisa Reisert said there was a bomb in fourteen oh eight. Does Julie Weber know about _that_?"

"Yes," Eric said flatly. "She's aware of the situation—"

At the word "bomb," Cynthia's eyes had gone from "wide" to "billboard." "Why aren't we evacuating?"

Eric stopped just short of a snort. "Because—obviously—there's no bomb in fourteen oh eight."

"You mind if I check with Julie Weber about that?" Virgil asked drily.

"That won't be necessary—"

"Page her for me. You don't, Mr. Janssen, and I'm calling the local police."

"I'll page her from Security," Eric said. Moving a bit too quickly, he left his post. He stepped through a door to the left of the reception desk and disappeared.

*****

Conklin and Clemons took Lisa to suite 1239. She should have known: Rosemary Wheeler was apt to have rooms reserved throughout the hotel.

When Clemons knocked, and he and Conklin and Lisa entered, Rosemary was standing at the sitting room's main table, packing electronics equipment, camera leads, a laptop, into a midsize olive-drab designer suitcase. "Hate to leave all this behind," she said. "Costs do add up, and it's always best to minimize evidence. Even at the site of a future crater." She spoke conversationally, not immediately looking over. "Dave, would you keep an eye on things in the hall? Mark, make sure Anders can work in peace up on fourteen. I want to have a word in private with Miss Reisert.

"I love superstitions, don't you?" she added, turning to Lisa as the door closed behind Conklin and Clemons. "Fourteen's really thirteen, isn't it? In building-speak? It's certainly going to be bad luck for Jackson."

Lisa found herself looking at Wheeler's clothes. Earlier, Rosemary had been wearing something-- businesslike. Lisa had had a raging headache, which was still lingering in fits and nauseating starts, and then she'd been drugged, so the details weren't sharp in her mind, but she remembered slacks, some sort of jacket. Now Rosemary was wearing khaki cargo-pocket shorts, all-terrain boots, and an ash-gray t-shirt with a chest-centered capital-C-and-eagle logo and the words _University of Chicago Cross Country._

She had her black hair tied back in a loose ponytail. In the shorts and the t-shirt she might pass for one of the kids partying on nine. But that wasn't the thought foremost in Lisa's mind.

She'd seen an identical shirt before.

In Jackson's closet.

Rosemary continued: "I told him-- well, in so many words-- that you were dead. I hope it doesn't cramp his fighting style."

Lisa took a step toward her, and a gun materialized in Rosemary's hand. The black Walther from earlier.

"Uh uh, sweetie. The lucky kick to the wrist won't work this time."

The kick Lisa had managed in London, in the British Museum, fighting Rosemary through instinct and angry grief when she thought Wheeler had shot and killed Jackson. Lisa froze now, but she felt no fear. She thought: _You set Jackson up to kill me. You've sent someone to kill him now._

She kept her face absolutely neutral as she looked at Rosemary Wheeler. As she felt the handle of Jackson's knife, nestled against her side. She thought:

_You put a bomb in my hotel, you bitch._

Rosemary finished packing. She shut the suitcase, straightened, pointed the barrel of the gun at Lisa's belly.

"Goodness, it's stuffy in here." She gestured toward the sliding glass door leading out to the balcony. "Shall we get some air?"

*****

Virgil figured that Cynthia must have realized almost exactly when he did: Eric was bolting.

"Pull the fire alarm," he said to her. "Call Security; call the cops; call your boss."

He ran the way Eric went, through the door to the left of the desk. Carpeted corridor, doors to the sides. Security, the hotel's offices. A door slammed shut up ahead. Virgil opened it, stepped through without hesitation. Not likely the big bastard was armed.

He found himself in a tiny paved lot. Employee parking. Slick wet tarmac underfoot, warm rain pelting from the inky heavens, the lot's tower lights and the wind snapping tree-shadows against the side of the building. Eric was running toward a late-model Impala. He glanced over his shoulder as the door whumped shut behind Virgil, and as Virgil bull-charged him, he re-pocketed his car keys and ran.

*****

In the corridor beyond the door of suite 1408, the fire alarm went off. Inside the suite, unable to stand, Jackson Rippner coughed, spat a mouthful of blood onto the cream-colored carpeting.

"Pathetic," Anders Vliet said softly.

Rippner mumbled around the gore in his mouth: "She'll just blow you up, too."

"No, she won't." With his left hand, Vliet reached into the pocket of his jacket, took out a remote. The remote for the new detonator he was going to install on the king-sized block of C-4 that Rosemary Wheeler's stooge, Eric Janssen, had had delivered to the suite's bedroom. He held it up, mockingly, for Rippner to see. "Private channel. Scrambled."

"Stupid," Rippner said. His voice was flat, detached. Like he was already dead, a corpse by definition if not yet in fact, and someone else was speaking through him. "You shouldn't have shown me that."

Vliet frowned slightly, then winced as he moved his head and his throat stung where the garrote had cut him. It had been a dirty attack, all the more underhanded for having been perpetrated by a man known for his skill with a blade. Nevertheless, Vliet could understand why Rippner used the wire: by the look of him, for reasons unknown, Rippner had lost a lot of blood. He no longer had the strength or coordination for a knife fight. The most he could have hoped for was to get the wire around Vliet's throat and to hang on.

Which he hadn't managed to do.

For a moment, Vliet felt disappointed: he'd looked forward to killing Rippner hand-to-hand, on even terms. But Rippner, on his knees between the piano and the window, his eyes glazing, his blood dripping from his torso onto the floor, was no longer worth fighting. With his right hand, Vliet took out the Glock holstered against his left side, under his jacket.

"Time for your mercy killing, Rippner," he said, not without compassion. He stepped behind Rippner, aimed the muzzle of the Glock at the back of the man's head.

Only Rippner was no longer there.

He was wiry; he was compact; he was lizard-quick. He scrambled under the piano. Vliet heard three quiet clicks, and then Rippner was facing him from the closed keyboard.

Vliet, surprised, leveled the Glock at Rippner's nose--

A commotion in the hall. A blunt _thump,_ like a body hitting the wall.

A gunshot.

_Hell_-- Vliet thought. _She took care of security_--

The thought: a single second. In the second after that, in the second during which Vliet failed to fire, Rippner rammed the piano.

Five hundred and fifty pounds of Baldwin, one hundred and fifty pounds of lean human male. A terrible, steely strength. A terrible focus. The casters well-oiled, unlocked mere seconds ago, when Rippner dove under the piano, the wheels not sticking in the humidity-controlled air-conditioning, the pile of the carpet plush but not deep enough to be a hindrance. He took a wide step back, shoved up against the piano like a linebacker, with all the blind aggression of a bighorn sheep, got his left shoulder braced against the case, and pushed. The Vibram soles of his shoes kept their grip on the carpeting. He felt a twinge of pain from his left rotator cuff, and the piano, on its well-made, well-oiled wheels began to move--

The case caught Vliet in the belly. Not hard enough to be painful, but hard enough to shock. He dropped the remote onto the polished piano-top now closed over the strings; the device slid toward Rippner. Vliet, the piano shoving him backward, slowly but inexorably, like a maple-cased freight train just getting underway, made a decision:

He aimed at Rippner's nose bridge and pulled the trigger.

As Rippner ducked.

The Glock barked: the bullet whistled through the hair above Rippner's left ear as Rippner pushed the piano that much harder.

Vliet's back bumped up against something solid yet giving, and a second too late he realized he had reached the window. The gun was still in his hand. The remote had nearly slid off the edge of the piano case. He grabbed for it, threw himself to the side--

Had he done one or the other, he might have survived.

His fingers missed the remote by a quarter of an inch.

The window shattered behind him as the weight of the piano propelled him through the glass. He aimed the Glock one last time as he burst out, in a shower of glittering crystal shards, into the humid, wind-whipped shock of the rainy dark air, at the smirk now lightning-lit on Jackson Rippner's face--

And then Vliet and the piano dropped fourteen floors, some fifty yards straight down, into the oceanside swimming pool of the Lux Atlantic Resort.

*****

Forty seconds earlier, Virgil and Eric ran past the last row of cars and through a break in the hedge that rimmed the employee parking lot. They were circling around the back of the Lux when the fire alarm whooped to life inside. Breakers to Virgil's right, a hundred yards away across the beach, curling crude-oil black in the stormy dark air and roaring to froth against the sand.

And then, from high above, a crash that wasn't thunder.

Eric stopped. Nearly to him, Virgil stopped, too.

They stared up, amazed, as, lit by a flash of lightning, a piano burst from a window high above their heads, and--

_Holy cow,_ thought Virgil, _that's a **man**--!_

-- plummeted down the side of the hotel into the pool. A gap between flash and thunder: a tremendous crash, a splash, a cacophonous, crunching _chord_--

Then Eric was running again, and Virgil didn't have time to count the floors up to the black rectangular gap in the side of the hotel where a window had just spewed forth a piano. But he thought, as he ran, that it was near enough to fourteen.

Where Roy Prudhomme had been heading.

He picked up speed. He sprinted toward that big, beefy, running bastard. He nearly had a hand on him when Eric broke to the left, into a glass door leading back into the hotel. Virgil's momentum carried him past the door; he was through it four seconds after his quarry, his feet nearly going out from under him as his boots tracked water onto the tile of the lobby floor. Cynthia looked their way from the reception, and there was a blonde woman in a dark pantsuit just leaving her, running for the elevators, barking orders into a walkie-talkie as she went, and people were already filing into the lobby from the hotel's innards, quickly, in various stages of dress and irritation. No hollering, though. No obvious fear. _Set a fire alarm off on a rainy night, _Virgil thought grimly, _and annoyance'll trump panic every time_. _Common sense, too._

He thought, also: that blonde was apt to be Julie Weber. She looked capable. Mad as hell, too. Virgil reached the front entrance of the hotel a step behind Eric. They both avoided the revolving doors. Back out into the rain and humidity, dry for a second under the awning that sheltered the hotel's arrivals area, and then Eric sprinted into the street, past clumps of displaced Lux patrons gathering on the sidewalk.

A wet screech of rubber on asphalt. A solid, fleshy thump. Virgil held up.

As Eric Janssen rolled off the hood of the cab that just hit him. He dropped to the slick pavement and didn't get up.

*****

As Virgil Carr had surmised, the blonde woman was Julie Weber, head of security for the Lux Atlantic Resort; moreover, she was, indeed, as mad as hell.

Cynthia had paged her, ironically enough, just as she was returning to the lobby after handling incidents upstairs, and now, as the fire alarm whooped, she was running for the main elevator bank, emergency-no-stops key in hand.

Lisa Reisert was missing, quite likely in a world of trouble, and Julie had at least two people who weren't on her staff wearing Lux Security uniforms and running loose in the building with dangerous intent. On top of that, she likely had a bomb to contend with. She had her team-- her known team, her trusted squad-- sweeping the building from the top down, helping customers to evacuate. And, according to the tracker screen in the security office, she had two walkie-talkies unresponsive: one on fourteen, one on twelve. Per the information Cynthia had received from the Wyoming sheriff named Virgil Carr, Julie had left instructions for the Miami PD bomb squad to head immediately to 1408. Julie herself was proceeding to twelve. A gut feeling: if Lisa wasn't already dead in a Dumpster or a drainage canal, that was where she'd be, with whoever was carrying that no-response walkie in the south wing near 1239.

Alone in the elevator on the no-stops express ride to twelve, Julie was practically twitching with frustration. Power fluxes from the storm, kids and booze on nine, some dumb bastard-- a cop yet, in from Boston for the national convention-- showing off a collector's pistol on six. All the while a real disaster was unfolding all around her. If she had the time, she'd be kicking herself.

*****

The fire alarm was howling. Maybe three minutes before Jackson Rippner tested Miami's gravitational field using Anders Vliet and a Baldwin baby grand, Royal Prudhomme walked casually toward the door of suite 1408. A man was standing there, one of the security guys who had supposedly escorted Lisa Reisert to the lobby. Conklin: that was the name. Roy saw him frown, saw him try to hide surprise.

Saw him not quite reach under the left side of his blue Lux Security suit jacket.

"We meet again," Prudhomme said amiably, over the rise-and-fall whoop of the alarm. "Miss Reisert make it to the lobby okay?"

"She did."

"You fellows get around, don't you? Shouldn't you be helpin' folks evacuate?"

"I suggest _you_ evacuate, sir. The situation is under control here."

From beyond the door of the suite: thumps, a thud, a grunt. A heavy slam.

"Sounds like someone's gettin' killed in there," Roy said.

"Sir, please: leave the building."

"You do remember I'm law enforcement, right? Not exactly my jurisdiction, maybe not my business, but would you mind tellin' me what the hell is goin' on in that room? Just as a professional courtesy--?"

"As you said, sir, it's not your business." Conklin directed a terse nod toward the emergency stairs.

"Right. My apologies."

Roy turned to walk away. Heard the click of a safety coming off-- not that he needed to hear it: he was turning back around anyway-- and swung his right elbow with the full weight of his body behind it into Conklin's face.

*****

Twelve thirty-nine. Junior suite with a balcony. In the corridor outside the suite, customers hurried past a red-headed man in a Lux security uniform who was making no attempt to direct them to the stairs or to assist them otherwise. Julie Weber didn't recognize him. She joined the flow of people, and when she reached the man, in the second before the surprise on his face translated into action, she swung a cinderblock of a right hook into his jaw. He dropped like a sack of cement.

Gasps of shock around her. Hesitation in the foot traffic.

"Please keep moving." Julie's voice was firm and professional. She kept an eye on the man on the floor as she looked reassuringly at the customers pausing to gawk. "Proceed to the stairs and exit the building as quickly as possible."

*****

Lisa said, as the fire alarm went off, "It's over, Rosemary."

For a moment, Rosemary's gaze was less cold than distant. "That's just what he said."

"Are you going to kill every woman who shows an interest in him?"

"Mm, no." Rosemary's eyes returned to the here-and-now. She smiled for Lisa. "Only the tawdry, boring, cheap, working-class nobodies." Warm rain-splattered wind washed into the suite as she opened the door to the balcony. She kept the Walther trained on Lisa's midriff. "Be a good girl and step outside."

*****

Roy felt the impact of his elbow on Conklin's jaw all the way to his shoulder blade. He heard a crunch of teeth. Conklin staggered, reached under his jacket. Royal popped him again in the jaw, with a big bony fist this time, his other hand following Conklin's right under the man's suit jacket. A pistol there against his side, holstered between his ribs and his hip bone. Roy jammed his hand down hard over Conklin's hand on the gun, and the thing went off, just as Conklin's body told him that Roy's last punch had been a knockout. He slumped down the wall.

And the dumb bastard was shot in the foot now, too.

"Something t' look forward to when you wake up, son," Roy said, taking the gun. A black Glock. He checked Conklin for other weapons, found a fixed-blade Gerber sheathed on the guy's right calf, took that, too. He stripped the laces from Conklin's shoes and tied his wrists and ankles.

Then he straightened himself, focused on the door to 1408. Right as he was thinking _Do I announce, or do I just kick it in--?,_ there came a tremendous sound of shattering glass from inside the suite.

Roy shot the lock and kicked in the door.

Just in time to see a man and a piano go out the window on the far side of the suite's sitting room.

*****

On the opposite end of the wing, on the the city-facing side of the Lux Atlantic Resort, one floor down, Lisa Reisert slid her left hand slowly, surreptitiously, under the right side of Jackson Rippner's tailored, bloodstained suit jacket.

"Maybe I'm just a customer-service drone," she said, "but I was smart enough to let Jackson know how I feel about him."

Lightning lit Rosemary's pale face. With the balcony door open, the thunder that followed sounded as if it came from inside the room. "I let him know, too, and he told me to fuck off."

Lisa's fingers were nearly to the handle of Jackson's knife. "What did you do to deserve that, Rosemary?"

Rosemary's face went still. Cold anger filled her serge-blue eyes.

"One last choice, Lisa," she said. "One you don't deserve." She gestured with the Walther toward the black, rainswept balcony. "Let's call it a test of character: jump or get shot."

*****

The sitting room of 1408 was filling with muggy, wet, gusting air. A wiry fellow, average height, his back to Roy, stood within a yard of what had been a wall-sized window, now busted near completely out. Dark hair, dark dress slacks, a light blue dress shirt. He seemed to be wavering a bit on his feet, looking down at the drop outside.

"You want to turn around slowly," Roy said to him. "Keep your hands where I can see 'em."

The guy turned. Young fellow, sorta ageless twenties, maybe early thirties. He had crazy-blue eyes, near perfectly clear, the sort that seemed almost to glow in the dark. From those eyes and the look on his face-- a sort of rictus stare, dead and very dangerous-- Roy's first inclination was that he was bombed to hell and back on meth. Only he wasn't twitching.

And the front of his shirt was soaked with blood.

"Gonna ask you a few questions, son." Roy kept the Glock leveled, but his tone was calm. "What's your name?"

"Rippner. Jackson Rippner."

Roy took a quick look into the suite's bedroom, saw no one. "Are we alone in here, Jackson?"

"We are now, yes."

"You got any weapons on you, son?"

"No, sir."

The "sir" was tired, a little worn down, if anything, not sarcastic. The boy had been handled by cops before.

"Can I believe that?"

"Yes."

A wailing of sirens from far below, through the wind and the open wall. "I met a girl a few floors down," Roy said. "Reddish-brown hair, gray eyes, pretty as sin. Said she's management here. Can you tell me her name?"

"Lisa Reisert." A flicker of hope through the dead-eyed stare. "Is she alright?"

"That I cannot say." Roy nodded toward Rippner's torso. "She do that to you?"

"No." A faint smile, sardonic. "I did it to myself." He started for the door to the suite, his pale face going grim. "I have to help her--"

"Got a friend looking into that downstairs." Roy focused his aim with the Glock. Made the motion casual but noticeable. Rippner stopped. He was swaying slightly on his feet. Shaking, actually, though he was trying hard to hide it. Roy guessed he was maybe a minute from falling over. "Son, you push a man through a window with a piano, you got yourself powerful bosses, or a powerful reason, or both. Care to tell me what the hell just happened in here?"

In response, Rippner indicated the remote on the floor of the sitting room. Roy didn't need to be an expert in munitions to tell the thing wasn't meant to control a TV. He scowled, looking down at it. Then Rippner pointed him to the bed that was actually a bomb, and Roy put the Glock aside.

"These things yours?" he asked.

"No." Rippner leaned heavily into the doorframe of the bedroom. He spoke more to the floor than to Roy, and he was panting now, softly. "A woman named Rosemary Wheeler was trying to blow up the hotel. The man who went out the window worked for her."

"Can you prove it?"

"No. Not right now."

"Think you need to lie down, son."

"Would you mind--?"

"Think it'd be best. Local police are on the way: they'll help Miss Reisert." Simple reassurance, more than anything. Rippner was in no shape to rescue his girl: that much was plain. And, like Roy, he could have no idea where she might be. They might ask the bozo in the hall, barring the fact that the man was still unconscious.

While Rippner stretched out on the sofa, wincing and cautious, as slow in his movements as a man maybe three times his age, Roy called down to the desk: EMTs and a bomb squad needed in 1408. Hell, likely Virgil's doing, they'd already caught on about the bomb bit. Roy fetched a clean towel from the bathroom, unbuttoned Rippner's shirt, located the seeping slash wound in the man's torso, and pressed the folded towel over it. Rippner didn't even flinch. He was looking up at the ceiling, and his breathing was going shallow.

"You're gonna be fine, son," Roy said. But he knew that wasn't what was going through the kid's mind. "She's gonna be fine, too," he added, gently. "Rest easy, now."

Rippner looked like a pitbull that'd been beat near to death. Like all the hope in him was bleeding out with his blood. Unless Royal Prudhomme, after twenty years of police work, had learned nothing about blade wounds and exsanguination, Rippner, his eerie clear eyes locked wearily on a point somewhere between him and heaven, was some three-quarters dead. Roy settled himself more comfortably on the floor next to him, to keep the towel in place and to do his best to make sure Rippner kept breathing until the EMTs showed up. As he did, he bumped his right elbow.

It stung more than it ought. Roy looked.

One of Conklin's teeth was embedded in the back of his arm, just below the joint-bone. Roy pulled the tooth out, examined it in the dim light. An incisor. A white Chiclet spotted with blood.

"Son of a bitch," he said, softly.

*****

A knock at the door of suite 1239. A woman's voice called: "Julie Weber, Lux Atlantic Security. Please open the door."

Rosemary kept her eyes on Lisa, kept the Walther pointed at Lisa's gut. She pressed her index finger to her lips-- _shhh_ -- and reached over to switch off the lamp that lit their side of the room.

Another knock. "Lux Atlantic Security."

A three-count, and then Lisa heard a keycard slide through the lock outside. As head of Security, Julie carried a master-key with her at all times.

The door opened, and Julie Weber eased into the suite.

"Where are my manners...?" Rosemary called toward her. "Please, Miss Weber: come in."

Julie let the door close behind her. From the corner of her eye, Lisa could see her looking toward them. Was Julie armed? Normally, the security staff carried no weapons. She'd gotten past Clemons, stationed outside the door. Had he been carrying a gun? Had Julie thought to search him? With the light on their side of the room out, Lisa wasn't certain if Julie could see--

"She has a gun, Julie," she said.

Rosemary smiled at her. "Why, you're right, Lisa. I do."

Then she shot Julie Weber.

Blood splattered the door now closed behind Julie. The impact of the slug knocked her backwards.

Despite herself, Lisa shrieked.

But then, while the barrel was still pointed away, she grabbed for the Walther. Caught Rosemary at the wrist. Rosemary swung on her, punched Lisa in the jaw with her free hand. Lisa hung on. Hit the other woman back, pain and shock and anger jolting through her. The rain was coming in through the open balcony door; they were half onto the balcony itself, and the footing was becoming slick--

Lisa slipped. Her right knee buckled, though she managed not to fall. Rosemary jerked free: she still had the gun--

"You working-class _bitch_."

Lisa looked directly into the Walther's black barrel.

And Julie tackled Rosemary.

Not gracefully. Not with the usual skill of a woman ranked highly in several schools of martial arts.

Only with the strength and discipline and desperation of a woman whose greatest fear was not to have done her duty toward the people who relied on her.

She was hit, she had slumped, but she was never completely down. Now it was too soon, if barely, for her to go into shock. She had seconds, possibly, before her body overrode her will and insisted that she stop and assess the damage she'd suffered.

So Julie threw herself across the room and tackled the woman who was about to shoot Julie's co-worker and friend.

It was crowded there, on the other side of the room, at the cusp between indoors and out. Limbs tangled, torsos impacted.

And all three of them-- Lisa Reisert, Julie Weber, and Rosemary Wheeler-- stumbling, struggling, tackling, and tackled--

*****

*****

-- went over the balcony railing.

*****

*****

*****


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N:** This was going to be one chapter, and then a trusted longtime friend pointed out that I would be unable to resist ONE. MORE. CLIFFHANGER. She was right. Cliffhangers are my downfall. (As are bad puns.) Now what was once one chapter is now two. And so, with apologies....

*****

*****

However long they stayed together, whatever else they might argue about, if she and Jackson survived this night, Lisa would never begrudge him the vanity of his tailored well-made suits.

She was nearly over the railing. She was practically inverted, the roiling sky and then Julie and Rosemary and the side of the Lux itself flashing past as she tipped, her right hand clamping on to Julie's wrist and Julie's falling weight pulling her into the black gusting air--

-- when the left sleeve of Jackson's jacket snagged on something in the railing -- a screw, the sharp edge of a clamp, a bit of ornamental metal--

Snagged and held.

Her toppling stopped. Yanked to a halt, Lisa grabbed blindly with her right hand, locked her fingers around rain-wet metal. An upright in the railing. She grunted in pain as Julie's weight jerked her belly and the bottom of her rib cage tight against the railing's top bar. Her feet were pulled clear of the deck: she kicked her right leg through two of the railing's uprights, twisted her ankle to the side, braced it against the slick metal.

With sparks bursting before her eyes, she hung half-upside-down, holding on to Julie's wrist. Julie held onto her.

"Well done, Lisa," said Rosemary Wheeler.

Who was hanging on to Julie, her arms clamped around the other woman's waist.

Lisa started. Julie looked up at her. Lisa had her by her right wrist, the side on which Rosemary had shot her; Julie felt the muscles in her face twist with shock and pain.

She assessed the situation a second before Lisa did. She knew Lisa's grip was tenuous at best; she sensed that, in addition to shooting Julie herself, Rosemary Wheeler that night had been a source of chaos if not outright evil at the Lux. She met Lisa's eyes and said: "Let go."

They were over a hundred feet above the ground. No pool below them. Not that that mattered, really: falling into open water from this far up would be not unlike falling onto concrete.

"No--" Lisa, her lungs compressed against the railing, was gasping for breath. Her fingers slipped on the upright: the weight of the women below her was dragging her over the edge--

"You'll fall, too." Julie was panting. She was still holding on to Lisa, as Lisa was holding on to her, but their skin of their wrists was wet and slick. She was making no effort to dislodge Rosemary: a struggle might send all three of them falling. "Let go."

"You know why he'll never stay with you, Lisa--?" This from Rosemary, breathlessly, drily, too, as she began to pull her way up Julie--

"-- you don't have vision, drive, focus--"

She gripped Julie's wounded shoulder savagely, climbing. Julie cried out. Rosemary continued--

"You're not a predator, Lisa. You don't have a taste for blood."

She'd lost the gun, but it didn't matter. She wouldn't need it. Not to finish the wounded security drone, to kill Jackson's pet bitch. She had discipline and intent on her side. She was inches away from gaining her own grip on the balcony, and then Lisa Reisert would be superfluous for the last time.

"It's not that, Rosemary—" Lisa nodded toward her own side. "My right, Julie. _Julie_: do you see it--?"

-- and Julie nodded once in reply, tightly, seeing Jackson's second knife, still hanging handle-down in its scabbard under Lisa's right arm.

Lisa Reisert looked coldly down at Rosemary Wheeler. "I just don't have the reach."

-- as Julie reached up with her left hand, pulled the knife free, and swung the blade behind her, hard.

Between the pelting of the rain, the rumble of thunder, a wet punching sound. Rosemary's eyes went wide.

She looked up at Lisa and said: "Fuck."

Then she lost her grip, and she and Jackson's knife, the blade buried between two of her left-side ribs, dropped into the hundred feet of darkness between Julie and the ground.

*****

Rippner had always thought he would know when he was dying. Once, in the foyer of Lisa's father's house, shot and stabbed, he'd contemplated the damage to himself through a scrim of shock. He was a fan of shock. In addition to the sneeze and the orgasm, it was perhaps the third greatest selling point on the features list of the human body.

Among other things, it allowed him to see, with a certain distant and relatively pain-free clarity, that he was dying now.

The man holding the towel to Rippner's bleeding torso was named Prudhomme. Roy Prudhomme. He wasn't trying to keep Rippner talking. Rippner appreciated that. No fake bonding. No sugary reassurance with limited grounding in reality. The only person whose welfare truly concerned him wasn't here. She was likely dead. And if that were true, his own survival held that much less importance to him.

He was beginning to have trouble staying conscious. Still, he could recognize the fact and concentrate on counteracting it. With his eyes fixed on the air between him and the ceiling, he could focus on staying awake. But he was going numb, from the torso out. He was getting cold, too, despite the warmth of the humid stormy air filling the suite.

Prudhomme was a sheriff out west. Despite the decreasing flow of blood to his brain, Rippner could still appreciate the irony. He might have said something to that effect; he thought he heard himself say, "You know what's funny--?"

And then there was a commotion at the entrance of the suite. "Bomb squad. EMS!"

_I'm being rescued,_ Rippner thought. He thought he might be smiling. _I'm being rescued by cops_.

His eyelids closed. He didn't think to open them again.

*****

Lisa's right shoulder was throbbing, a sick, burning pain. It matched the pain of her resurrected tension headache. She was losing her grip, on the railing, on Julie--

"You have to climb, Julie. Climb. You have to fucking climb--"

Lunging up to grab the knife, then twisting to stab Wheeler, left an airless void where Julie's strength had been. The wound in her shoulder had her now. Nothing but nauseating pain. Her right arm was jerked straight, and their fingers, hers and Lisa's, were twisting free of the grips they had on each other's wrists. "I can't-- Lisa--"

"God damn it--" Lisa spat rainwater. "All that time you waste in the fucking gym, fucking wasted fucking time working out--"

She was normally not prone to cursing, but the words were like a mantra. She could feel the railing grinding her flesh against her ribs. Her feet still couldn't reach the deck of the balcony, her right ankle and her equally bruised right thigh were slipping clear of the uprights, and Jackson's jacket, wet and increasingly rain-soaked, was stretching more and more where it had snagged--

"Lisa--"

"You climb _right fucking now_, Weber, or we're going to _die_."

She snarled the words, hearing Jackson's tone in her own voice. Watched rainwater mingled with sweat and tears drip onto the face of the woman below her. Saw pain and fear and resentment, hatred even-- of herself, of Lisa, of the woman who left them in this mess-- harden into resolve in Julie's eyes.

Lisa gritted her teeth as Julie clawed her way up her arm, dug her fingers desperately into Lisa's shoulder cap, into the flesh beneath her left shoulder blade. Lisa released Julie's right arm, gripped her by the back waistband of her slacks as Julie got a foot braced against the lower cross-bar of the balcony railing.

Then Lisa hauled backward with all her strength, and Julie somersaulted past her, coming back over the railing. Soggy and stretched, the sleeve of Jackson's jacket ripped free of its snagging-point on the railing; the jacket itself nearly turned inside out over Lisa's head. She and Julie fell in a heap on the balcony deck. Lisa rolled clear and lay for a moment on her back, panting, blinking rainwater from her eyes as she looked up into the black-and-blue sky.

"Julie--?" She sat up. Beside her, Julie was having less success. She was trying to push up with her left hand, but she couldn't quite seem to get a fix on the deck. Lisa took her gently by her unwounded shoulder. "Let's get you inside."

*****

Thank God, the core staff hadn't evacuated yet. Cynthia was still at the desk. She said, almost before Lisa could ask, phoning down, with the near-telepathy of a good co-worker and, more than that, a good friend, that the police and EMTs were on their way to 1239. Lisa continued, speaking clearly, quickly:

"Tell the police, Cynthia: the woman who put the bomb in fourteen oh eight: her name is Rosemary Wheeler. She was here; I think she's dead." _She **must** be dead._ "Eric: he's in on it, too. He's working with her--"

Cynthia said:_ Lisa, they just brought Jackson down_--

Lisa stopped speaking. She held her breath. She could feel her pulse in her throat, could hear it thrum in her ears--

_-- they're taking him to South Miami Hospital. He was out of it, and he was really pale, but he was-- Lisa, are you there?_

"Yes, Cynthia, I'm here."

_He's alive._

"Thank you." Tears filled Lisa's eyes. "Get those EMTs up here ASAP, Cynthia, okay?"

_They're on their way, Lisa_.

*****

Julie refused to lie down. The slug-- at least some of it, as far as Lisa could tell-- had passed directly through her shoulder. A bloody localized pulping of flesh and fabric, front and back. She seemed afraid to lie against it. Instead, she sat with her back propped gingerly against the wall to the right of the balcony door.

"Christ," she said, "what a night."

"You're telling me," Lisa replied, pressing a folded towel to Julie's perforated shoulder.

Julie flinched at the contact, her breath hissing past her teeth. "Those kids on six-- you know, the spring breakers in the Hotwire Ghetto--"

Lisa corrected her, her tone gently teasing: "The 'business goodwill accommodations,' Julie--"

"--they had a keg. A fucking _keg_."

"I know."

"You _know_?"

Lisa, who'd suffered a baptism by Budweiser earlier in the evening, asked: "Why do you think I smell like this?"

"How the fuck did they get it up there? A whole _keg_. I should have known." She stifled a laugh, but, in pain, half in shock, Julie was trying harder not to cry. "God, I should have known--"

"Julie, shhh--"

"Completely irresponsible-- I should have--"

"You busted them, right?"

"Eventually, but--"

"You busted them. You're not fired." Lisa met Julie's tear-filled eyes. "Now just relax. Okay?"

*****

Having placed the man called Rippner into the capable hands of Miami's emergency medical services, Roy Prudhomme left the Lux. The local police would expect a statement from him later, and Miami's finest were already on hand in force both inside and outside the premises, but for now Roy was just another patron of the hotel, there was a bomb scare on, and he was expected to evacuate. Virgil Carr was already standing across the street, not quite under the awning of the wide glass doors of a Hilton. Folks who had to be from the Lux were sheltered in groups under the awning, crowding the cabs and the cars coming in to unload, or they were huddling in clumps along the sidewalk while the police and people who had to be Lux personnel directed them to shelter from the rain. More than likely, too, folks from the Lux were already boosting the Hilton's bar business. Roy joined Virgil, stood with him in the rain to the side of the awning. Crowded enough under there as it was. Anyway, thought Roy, the rain felt good. A warm rain. Not chilled by high mountain air. Almost like having a shower outside. They'd be let back into the Lux soon enough.

He watched as, outside the Lux, EMTs finished loading a body in a zipped black bag onto a gurney and into an ambulance. Not Rippner: he might have been half bled out, but he was obviously more than a tough little cuss, and Roy had left him alive. The police were taking a statement from a cab driver, a skinny guy in a loud print shirt. They were standing next to a yellow Ford cab with a dented hood and a busted windshield.

"You know anything about that, Virg?"

"Guy at the desk, he was in on the bomb thing. He made a run for it."

"He say anything about Miss Reisert?"

"Said she was escorted out and sent home. I tend not to believe that."

"Me, either." Roy frowned up at the Lux. Behind one of those windows black or lit through curtains and rain, there was apt to be a pretty girl with red-brown hair and gray eyes, and she was apt to be dead. He was glad Rippner didn't know that.

He and Virgil stood silent for a time. Then Virgil said: "Guess that wasn't you goin' out that window with the piano."

"Guess it wasn't."

"Guess not."

A moment. "You ain't fixin' t' hug me, are you, Virg?"

"Nope."

"You sure?"

"Yep."

"Okay."

*****

Julie Weber was on her way to the hospital. Having finally reached the lobby of the Lux, Lisa looked out toward the oceanside pool: a swarm of police, EMTs, one body in a too-flat black bag. A piano-- the piano from 1408-- shattered half on the pool deck, half in the water. Thank God it was a stormy night: no one had been swimming.

Lisa, in her ruined clothes, wet through, was near the desk. She was beginning to shiver. "Did they bring anyone else out, Cynthia? Besides Jackson and Julie?"

"No." Eric Janssen's mortal remains had just been removed from the pavement outside. Cynthia looked as though, while she didn't know quite how she felt about him being killed, she might eventually err on the side of elation. "A man was having chest pains on eight; he was stretchered out. Other than that-- Why?"

"Are they checking the north side? The ground under twelve thirty-nine?"

"They're checking everywhere, Lisa; it's procedure--"

"I know, Cynthia." A shudder rippled up Lisa's back. A chill in addition to shock and clamminess.

Rosemary Wheeler was missing.

With Julie off the premises, Lisa became senior security officer. Cynthia moved up from senior keyholder to desk manager. They had remained in the hotel after the other employees had evacuated. Cynthia, rising to the challenge of another emergency, looked more alert than frightened. Lisa scanned the lobby. A scattering of police and firefighters. No civilians.

No Rosemary.

*****

Rippner woke when they were cutting his clothes off.

"Mr. Rippner--? Can you hear me?"

He was standing beside the table on which Rippner lay: a middle-aged man in a blue surgical cap. Others with him, they, like him, in blue scrubs. A sharp whistle from one of them as the scars on Rippner's bloody torso were laid bare. A woman's voice, dry: "He's been around, hasn't he?"-- not even bothering to whisper. Rippner didn't mind. He didn't hate the scars, or even those who had inflicted them. All part of the process, the drawn-out procedure, the methodical start-and-stop progression of a violent life--

"You're bleeding from an artery, Mr. Rippner," the man said. "We're going to see if we can--"

Rippner nodded. That is, he felt his head nod.

"-- repair the--"

-- as the man's face blurred with the lights overhead.

A disconnect; another voice, male: "-- relax; breathe deeply--"

A plastic mask, a cup, placed over Rippner's mouth. No instruction to count backward from a hundred. The rubber-sweet smell of anesthesia--

"-- keep the gas to a minimum--"

(Words not meant for him, from far and then farther away, beyond his eyelids and a leaden sinking sea of darkness.)

"-- his pressure is borderline. We can't risk--"

And: nothing.

*****

Half an hour after Lisa reached the lobby, the bomb squad, looking like a returns team from Slumberland, bore away that awful block of C-4. A rag-tag team of bomb dogs-- one extremely focused standard beagle, an eager-to-please golden Vizsla, a big, friendly American German shepherd-- was led through 1408 and 1239 and two other rooms that Rosemary Wheeler had reserved under the same alias-- Elizabeth Dolittle-- _very bloody funny, Eliza,_ thought Lisa-- and sniffed out nothing.

Then Lisa switched off the fire alarm, and a sort of chaos-in-reverse erupted in the lobby as the evacuation concluded and repatriation began. Cynthia coordinated the junior staff. Lisa instructed the security staff on handling lockouts, began to field the first of the complaints from wet and displaced customers.

She did her duty. She gave an initial statement a blue-uniformed police officer, then got to work. Eric was dead, Julie was in surgery, Jackson was, too, the hotel was in semi-crisis mode, and they were understaffed. Jackson would be the first to tell her she'd be more useful here than sitting in a waiting room. In the security office, an EMT checked her shoulder: there was a probable tear to the rotator cuff, but the shoulder itself wasn't dislocated.

When the initial chaos in the lobby had lulled to mere mayhem, Lisa went to change. Like many members of the hotel's public staff, she kept spare clothing on hand in case of emergency. Granted, a normal emergency usually consisted of nothing more dire than a coffee spill or an ink stain. She cleaned up in the women's locker room near the gym, combed and tied back her wet hair. She had yet to retrieve her purse; she borrowed the comb from Cynthia. Her blouse was ruined. She went to drop it in the waste bin; she stopped. She looked at Jackson's blood staining the white silk, and she thought how it might be her last contact with him, and there in the locker room by the sinks she started to cry.

She felt helpless; she felt deeply, angrily ashamed._ Keep it together, Reisert. People need you. And _**she's**_ still on the loose--_

On cue, a hand grasped her shaking shoulder. Lisa swung around, jerked and then twisted the hand and the arm to which it was attached. She rammed her forearm into a throat--

Cynthia's throat.

Cynthia's eyes had never been wider. Lisa had her shoved up against the wall, between two hairdryers. A croak escaped Cynthia's compressed windpipe: "Lisa--?"

A shock of recognition. Lisa released her. "Cynthia, I'm so sorry--"

Cynthia massaged her battered neck. "You and Jackson aren't just watching old movies and having really great sex, are you?"

For just a second, looking back at her, Lisa thought how Rosemary Wheeler was a master of disguise. However, the woman before her wasn't hurt: Rosemary would be, at a minimum, badly bruised-- depending on how she'd survived. _If _she'd survived. With awful luck, Lisa fully realizing the karmic implications of such black-hearted thinking, she was lying now, broken and dead, in the shrubs below 1239. Most tellingly, the hazel of this Cynthia's eyes wasn't the product of colored contact lenses.

"Who's at the desk, Cynthia?"

"Mr. Cleary." Robert Cleary, the Lux's general manager. "He's here." Cynthia touched Lisa's arm tentatively. "Are you okay to work? You can go--"

Lisa wiped her eyes. "No, I'm good."

She folded her ruined blouse and Jackson's ruined jacket and left them in the security office. She followed Cynthia back to the lobby. Jeff Anderson, the Lux's junior doorman, tow-headed, strapping, and tall, had come in on his night off to lend a hand in Security. Cynthia's face lit up when she saw him.

Behind the reception desk stood Robert Cleary, reassuringly and suavely reptilian in an impeccable gray suit. "Just between ourselves," he said, very quietly, to Lisa and Cynthia, in a voice that was old Park Avenue by way of the Bronx, while he seemed to watch both them and the lobby, simultaneously, with a chameleon's blue-gray eyes, "Mr. Janssen was an asshole."

*****

*****

When he realized he couldn't hear the hiss of the oxygen, the clatter of instruments on trays, the chatter of the surgical team, Rippner opened his eyes.

He couldn't feel the metal table against his back or the mask over his mouth or the nerve-shock nip of scalpel blades. He looked at the surgeon, at the nurse beside him, the anesthetist. They seemed not to notice that he was awake.

Rippner looked toward the foot of the operating table.

A man was standing there.

He was in his mid-thirties. Youngish. He had close-cut brown hair, a compact build. He wore jeans, a blue sweatshirt. No scrubs, no surgical mask. His eyes were the eyes Rippner saw when he looked in a mirror.

"Hi, Dad," Rippner said.

James Rippner smiled. He looked very much like his son. A bit narrower through the nosebridge, slightly less full through the lips: that was all. Now nearly alike in age, they might have been brothers. His face and skull were intact. He'd been shot in the head during a gas-station robbery, and his had been a closed-casket funeral.

"Are you ready, Jackson?" he asked.

Rippner sat up.

*****

Rosemary Wheeler limped into the lobby of the Lux Atlantic.

She had Jackson Rippner's knife. Which she had pulled from her own side after dropping twenty feet and breaking her right arm on the railing of a balcony on the tenth floor. An evacuated suite. She'd gotten the balcony door open, dragged herself inside, and blacked out on the floor for roughly five minutes. Understandable: the initial pain from her arm was nearly blinding, and she was stabbed as well. Then, after re-orienting herself, she had evaluated the resources available to her. A belt to bind and steady her broken arm, a scarf to conceal her hair and, partly, her face. A raincoat, ironically left behind.

As she left the stairs, Rosemary gripped the knife in her left hand, keeping the blade turned up, hidden between her side and her jacketed arm. The stabbing tour: she'd had her turn; now Lisa Reisert was next. Only Rosemary was going straight for the spine.

Lisa was standing near the reception desk, talking to a plainclothes detective with a bulldog's dumb-ugly face. If his cheap tan-weave suit and his overconfident boyscout stance hadn't already given him away, Rosemary could glimpse his I.D. on a chain around his neck. A blow to the base of Lisa's back, just above the buttocks. Properly done, it would feel like a hard punch, nothing more. Possibly worthy of a "Pardon me," as Rosemary passed by. Then Lisa Reisert would lose the feeling in those long, coltish, perfect legs, and she'd collapse, like the princess-whore she was, into the arms of that homely young cop who was taking too much time taking her statement.

By that time, Rosemary would be out the door, shedding the coat and the scarf, not minding the grinding, breathsnatching pain in her broken arm as she drifted into and then through the Lux patrons still streaming back into the hotel and vanished into the rainy night.

The way was clear. At the desk, a tall man in a good suit was busy calming the latest idiots who'd evacuated without remembering to take the key cards for their room. Beside him, a red-haired girl was splitting her obviously limited mental capabilities between someone on the phone and something on the computer monitor before her. She could hardly be expected to mind her surroundings, too. Slut Reisert was offering a tentative smile to that bulldog cop. Why couldn't Jackson have recognized the appalling cheapness of her--?

Rosemary moved in.

*****

Rippner stood with his father and looked back at his body lying there on the operating table. The shell of himself, pale, bloody, and scarred. The oxygen mask over his face, the unreal gore of the incision in his torso. The monitor about to flatline in green, yellow, and red. By the time the surgical team knew his heart had stopped, he would already be gone.

He was no longer cold.

He felt nothing. Not the chill of the floor beneath his bare feet. Not the burning pain of the wound in his side. Not even the ragged beat of his heart.

"Good to go, Jackson?" his father asked.

"Yeah." No pain. Not ever again. Rippner smiled. "I think so."

*****

*****

*****


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N:** Well, this is it. Managed to knock out two chapters this week, so keep in mind: Chapter 5 was not the end. This is the end. The end-end. Jackson may be all out of blood, and I am certainly all out of words. (And there was much rejoicing--! --for the latter part of that statement if not the first. Ahem.) Thanks for reading!

*****

*****

Cynthia saw the woman and felt surprise, a pang of guilt. During the evacuation, the hotel's security people must have missed her on their sweep from the top floor down: she was elderly, and she looked like she needed a walker. She might have missed the evacuation altogether. She was hunched, head down, her right arm crabbed against her side. She was wearing a long gray raincoat and shorts, and she had a scarf clumsily tied around her head, covering her hair. She was as much as scuttling across the lobby, angling toward the desk from the direction of the north stairwell door.

Cynthia stepped to leave the desk, to assist her, when the phone rang. Mr. Cleary was with a customer; Lisa was talking to a detective from the Miami police, a broad-faced, friendly younger man named Jeremy Laufer, who, while not as traditionally good-looking as Jeff Anderson, and definitely not as ethereally, exotically handsome as Jackson Rippner, certainly crossed the line to a sandy-haired "cute." Cynthia answered the phone. Security, reporting in: no further ground-level alarms; all the fire doors were re-closed and re-set. As Cynthia listened, the elderly woman neared the desk.

Lisa and Detective Laufer were beginning to move away; Laufer had likely suggested that they retreat to a quieter spot, maybe the coffee bar, where Lisa could give her statement away from the continuing commotion in the lobby. With one eye on the bustle in front of the desk and one eye on her computer monitor-- yes, the fire doors were now green-lit all across the ground floor-- Cynthia wondered why the woman was approaching the desk without looking like she intended to stop.

Then she realized the woman wasn't heading for the desk.

She was heading for Lisa. With intent in her movement and something clutched half-hidden behind the left sleeve of her raincoat.

Something slender, dark, and sharp-looking.

Her heart suddenly pounding, her breath catching in her throat, Cynthia stepped from behind the desk.

*****

He was ready to go. Where, he wasn't certain. But he felt no fear. Rippner looked back one last time at his body lying pale and beaten on the operating table.

Only--

"She might--" An ache, then, a small one, beneath his sternum. A certainty, now: doubt. He frowned; he looked at his father, realizing-- "She'll miss me."

_If she's alive._

In these few variable seconds, he had moved beyond want. He had shed himself of desire with the shedding of his body. With his body had gone corporal feeling. All that remained of his connection to the physical world was a simple fact:

"She needs me. I need her."

James Rippner laid a hand on his son's shoulder. His eyes were affectionate. "Go on back, Jackson."

*****

"Hey."

To her right. Just passing the reception desk, with Lisa Reisert a mere ten feet away, Rosemary Wheeler looked-- and a woman's fist, small and bird-boned in its delicacy but extremely well-placed, collided squarely with her nose.

She would tell herself later that the shot wouldn't have been enough on its own. But Rosemary had been stabbed, and her arm was broken, and between the mounting blood loss and the pain, her brain said, "Enough--!", and she went over backwards. She landed flat on her back, and all the wind went out of her. Above her head, the art deco chandeliers swam in a sea of stars.

Then Lisa Reisert was standing over her, looking down at Rosemary less with surprise than with cool and weary contempt. "Detective Laufer," she said, "meet Rosemary Wheeler."

"_That's_ Rosemary Wheeler--?" This from the owner of the fist, the red-haired girl who'd been behind the desk.

"The one and only," Rosemary heard herself mumble. Lisa Reisert hugged that flame-headed nit, and Rosemary added nausea to her current list of ailments. She thought that perhaps she should throw Jackson's knife away-- only she couldn't quite remember which hand it was in. The bulldog detective was kind enough to help her: he flicked it out of her left hand with the toe of his shoe. He seemed to flick several of her fingers off in the process.

"You let pain and ego cloud your judgment, didn't you, Rosemary?" Lisa was looking down at her again. "It didn't take a genius to tell you that this was a very bad idea."

A stab of hatred. _The bitch was looking **down** at her._ Rosemary went to get up--

And three things happened:

Her left hand, the hand attached to her unbroken left arm, and the floor seemed to repel one another. She couldn't even get squarely to her knees.

Bulldog Drummond casually unsnapped the leather strap holding his service revolver in its side holster. In doing so, he seemed to multiply. Rosemary suddenly found herself in a circle of cops.

And Lisa Reisert's carrot-topped cohort chimed in with: "Yeah. Kind of like grocery shopping when you're really hungry."

From beyond the tiny cloud of pain centered on her nose-- her _freshly broken_ nose-- Rosemary looked up at her incredulously. "You vapid, shallow, empty-headed twa--"

"Rosemary Wheeler," said Reisert's mutt of a detective, "you are under arrest."

*****

*****

*****

Rippner opened his eyes.

"Well, hello."

A woman's voice, to his right. Rippner was looking at the ceiling. Speckled white tiles. Lights, far too bright. He was lying on dense foam. Rough cotton weave pressed between his shoulder blades. His torso felt as though it had swollen to three times its normal size and been wrapped in casing, like a sausage. He might have been on Jupiter: he doubted he could move his head. It weighed hundreds of pounds.

The voice continued: "You certainly took your time waking up."

His incision felt distantly itchy. The rest of him felt

"Cold." His voice was a dry whisper.

"I'll get you an extra blanket, honey."

He saw her as she stood. She'd been sitting beside his cot. Mid-forties, peppered short hair, wearing maroon scrubs under a floral smock. He read her name tag as she tucked another looseweave light hospital blanket around him: Pamela Tucker, R.N. Her forearms and hands looked capable and strong, and she was careful of his incision.

"Can you tell me your name?" she asked.

"Jackson. Jackson Rippner." He spoke more clearly, though with effort. He was very tired.

"What city are you from, Jackson?"

Rippner's eyelids seemed to be gaining mass in proportion to his leaden skull. He felt warmer, though. The extra blanket was working. "Chicago, Illinois."

"Where are you now?"

"Miami, Florida."

She was asking, he knew, because he had died. He had died on the operating table, and the surgical team had brought him back, and now it was her job to find out what, if anything, his mind had lost when his brain had been starved of oxygen. He wanted to sleep. Surely her training dictated that she know that, too.

"Is there anyone we can contact, Jackson? You've been talking to your dad, off and on."

"He died in nineteen eighty-six."

"I'm sorry." Her hazel eyes conveyed genuine compassion. The information didn't seem to surprise her, though. No doubt she'd heard her share of semi-delirious post-op confessions. "Anyone else? Family? Friends in the area?"

The hospital personnel would have found his wallet in his pants; they had his insurance information. They had a legitimate address for him. He was otherwise invisible: Paul Miller had seen to it when Rippner had left the federal penal system following the Keefe affair. Rippner was clean, the records of his arrest, his trial documents, expunged. He'd make nary a blip on the Miami law-enforcement radar.

Nor would he make a blip anywhere else. No contact information in his wallet. Nurse Tucker was asking out of genuine, if professional, concern.

"She'll turn up," he said. His voice sounded thick; consciousness seemed to leak out of him with the words. He wondered how he'd managed to remember his anonymity. Sleep was crowding the thoughts from his head. Drugs, likely. On top of the blood loss. He liked drugs.

"Who, Jackson?"

Rippner looked at Nurse Tucker and smiled.

*****

The rain was falling in driving patches when Lisa finally left the Lux. She reached the hospital at eleven p.m. She knew that visiting hours were over: there was little to no chance that she'd be allowed in to see Jackson, wherever he might be. She didn't know. First, she hadn't had time to call, following the extra-bonus riot of Rosemary Wheeler materializing in the lobby and Cynthia laying her flat; then, she hadn't been able to bring herself to call. An ugly, honest truth: if Jackson was dead, she wanted to hear the news in person, not over the phone.

The information desk was still staffed. She was given directions to the post-op intensive care unit. The hospital's corridor lighting was night-dim; she had the elevator to herself. On the fourth floor, she passed through double doors, approached a central island. Near-silence. The hiss of oxygen, the quiet beeping of a monitor or an IV in need of tending. The air conditioning turned up a little too high.

One nurse, a muscular thirtyish man in merlot-colored scrubs, was up making the rounds. Two women, one in her late twenties or early thirties, the other a few years older, were seated behind the curving desktop of the island, working behind flat-screen computer monitors. The second woman looked up and said, as Lisa approached: "Mrs. Rippner?"

Lisa tried not to sound shocked: "Yes--?"

The woman smiled. Lisa, nearing, could see her name tag on her floral smock: Pamela Tucker, R.N. "Your husband said you'd be coming. He got out of recovery a little over an hour ago; they've just moved him to the ward."

"Can I see him?"

"He's likely asleep--"

Lisa's heart was pounding. A mix of elements blending to unreality: the day itself, the fact that she was very tired and very wound up, all at the same time. The bruises on her body, the throbbing in her head (fading now, though, finally, with the promise of blessed painlessness, almost like a vacation, to come). Jackson's ruse, and her shock at it. (Her primal elation at it, too, and a whole different source of shock there.) Of all these things, though, only one certainty, one single thing, mattered: he was alive.

She returned Nurse Tucker's smile, a little beseechingly. "Just for a minute--?"

Pamela Tucker pushed away from her paperwork and stood. "Sure, honey. Right this way."

*****

He was in an alcove to the left of the island, and he was unconscious. Deeply asleep. The centerpiece of a branching of tubes and wires, a stockade of wheeled monitors and drips. He lay on his back, with his right forearm, bare below the short white-and-dots sleeve of his hospital gown, resting across his belly. A plastic bracelet circled his slender wrist. He was more vulnerable, more exposed, than Lisa had ever seen him. Even after having shared a bed with him, a bathtub, a shower. Like all his outer layers, his energy, his defenses and projections, had been stripped away and just the core of him remained. Lisa nuzzled his cheek, kissed his forehead, his lips. She pulled in a round-backed steel-and-laminate chair and sat for a few minutes beside him, knitting her fingers with his, his hand and hers resting on his belly. Sensing him, the delicate strength of his bones, the warmth of his skin. She wondered if Nurse Tucker had noticed that neither she nor Jackson was wearing a wedding ring.

*****

Fifteen minutes later, leaving Jackson and Nurse Tucker, ten yards from the entrance to the ICU, in the nightshift illumination of the corridor, Lisa slowed.

A man was approaching from the direction of the elevators. In the reduced lighting, he was ominously large and dark. Spots of rainwater glimmered on his jacket, and he carried something in his right hand. Only when Lisa recognized him did she relax. And then only partly.

It was John Carter. Jackson's boss.

"Hello, Lisa," he said, quietly. The object in his hand was a gray plastic bag. JC Penney. Carter's expression, as Lisa spotted it, was, if anything, sheepish. It wasn't the first time she'd caught him doing Jackson's shopping. "I brought him some clean clothes."

There was a waiting room for patients' families down a corridor to the right. Empty at this hour. The wall-mounted television, tuned to CNN, was at minimum volume. Lisa reached up and turned it off anyway. Then she turned to Carter and asked: "Is he in trouble, John?"

Carter gestured toward the forest-green sofa. Lisa remained standing, so he did, too. "I think that's for you to decide," he said.

"He just prevented Rosemary Wheeler from blowing up my hotel."

Carter frowned, though not unreasonably. "He came here to hurt you."

"He came here to find out what was going on. Someone compromised his phone and his computer. Mine, too. Our messages weren't getting through--"

"Which makes this alright." He touched her face, gently, where the bruises were forming, where Jackson and then Rosemary Wheeler had hit her. "At the very least, he placed you in danger."

"Please don't judge him until you know the facts."

"I'm judging the situation as I presently understand it, Lisa."

"Rosemary Wheeler is responsible for what happened at the hotel. She's responsible for what happened to me and to Jackson. And she probably had help--"

"Paul Miller is looking in to that."

"And who's looking in to Paul?"

Carter paused. Looked at her with cool admiration, carefully concealed surprise. "I am."

"Hurting me was part of the ruse, John. He was trying to save me. Why are you so eager to kill him?"

"Of course I'm not eager to kill him. Christ, Lisa--"

"You'd have to kill me first. Do you understand?"

"Yes." He risked the barest beginning of a smile. "That bad, is it?"

"You should know. You went through the same thing with Claire, didn't you?"

Claire, Carter's wife. Rangy, tall, tousle-headed Claire. Sparks from the fire lighting her sharp blue eyes as she and Lisa sat listening to the boys-- Jackson, Carter, Claire's brother, Richie-- musically butcher and not quite butcher and then sing and play an old, crack-finished six-string Kay guitar quite beautifully indeed on a beach on the west coast of Scotland. Carter was nearly as much a bass in his singing voice as he was in speech; Jackson found within himself a lilting baritone that spoke of open wind-swept space beneath a clear night sky, not just this night but all nights like it, Lisa thought, with the final lingering copper-rose of sunset over the black western water and the stars perfectly white and sharp above. "Ship to Spain" was the song; Claire had suggested it. She and Carter and Lisa and Jackson had shared an adventure in London, the very adventure that left Rosemary Wheeler with a broken nose and placed Lisa, consequently, very much on Rosemary's bad side; now, a week later, on a beach near Mulvern, Lisa felt herself among friends. Looking at Claire and John, she felt comforted, comfortably optimistic. Years ago, Claire had told her, John had been a situations manager, much like Jackson was now.

As Lisa understood it, those years back, Claire had been John's killswitch. She'd been his sponsor en route to a less-murderous life. Had he threatened her, harmed her, she had only to issue a single-word command to the man who was then John's boss, and John's boss would have had him killed.

Put down like an animal that couldn't shed its aggression, its bloodthirsty ways.

For three months now, give or take, Lisa had been Jackson's killswitch. Simply, Carter was here to ask her if Jackson had failed in his transition to civilization. He was here to ask Lisa if Jackson had harmed her or, without reason, others.

He was here to ask if Jackson needed to die.

John Carter watched her for a handful of seconds, not speaking. He was a very tall man, six-foot-three or better, and powerfully built. Lisa had no doubt that, if Carter wanted, he could tear through her as if she weren't even there, no matter what Jackson had done to boost her skills in fighting and defense, no matter the determination in her heart. He had brown eyes so dark as to be nearly black. Lisa could imagine how terrifying those eyes would have been to those who had known Carter, briefly and oh-so-fatally, in his old life.

Those same eyes were thoughtful now. Gentle, even. "You're very perceptive, Miss Reisert," Carter said.

"Being a people person pays off, Mr. Carter." Lisa exhaled slowly. Without realizing it, she'd been holding her breath. She softened her expression without quite smiling. "He needs his sleep. Don't disturb him, okay?"

"I won't."

Carter breathed out, his shoulders relaxing. Lisa hadn't been the only one worried here. She gave Carter a quick hug, leaned up to kiss his cheek. He smiled in surprise, hugged her back, let her go. Lisa left the hospital.

*****

Home to her apartment. Half a dozen messages on the machine. All from her dad. More worried than angry, of course, but nevertheless earfuls of doting hell in thirty-second bites. _Call me when you get a chance, Lisa. It's been all over the news-_-

He had to be asleep by now, and if he wasn't he ought to be. The affectionate worry cut both ways: she didn't want to encourage his insomniac tendencies. She'd call in the morning. She turned on the television. Nothing on but late-night drivel, the hypnotic wee-hours suggestive-sell. Ninja swords and wet vacs, ripped abs, real estate. The CNN cycle was parked on sports. Lisa woke her iMac.

On the front pages of the websites for the Miami _Herald,_ WSVN 7:_ History nearly repeats at Miami hotel._

A picture of the Lux. A stock photo of Charles Keefe. Cynthia, a picture from tonight, wide-eyed, beaming for the camera.

_Heroic receptionist foils terrorist plot._

Lisa smiled. _Good for you, Cynthia._

Then she went still. A chill ran through her. She scanned those articles, and a dozen more besides, for mention of Jackson. Searched his name, frantically, on Google News--

Nothing.

She felt almost more of a chill then.

The 2005 bombing of the Lux was universally ascribed to a terrorist cell with possible connections to the Russian mob. Tonight's scare was the handiwork of a right-wing fundamentalist group, possibly to protest the national law-enforcement convention being held in Miami. Rosemary Wheeler wasn't mentioned by name. Jackson wasn't mentioned at all.

He was the invisible man.

The apartment suddenly seemed more empty than usual. Lisa hadn't eaten, but she wasn't hungry. She showered and went to bed, and in the dark she contemplated the difference between being lonely and being alone. _If no one sees us,_ she thought, _do we even exist?_

*****

As the cherry on top of a perfect maelstrom of a night, she forgot to set her alarm, and she overslept. The next day, Robert Cleary stayed on hand, partly filling in for Julie Weber, his wounded chief of security, and partly helping at the reception desk, settling nerves, listening to customer complaints, offering refunds and comps. Virgil Carr and Roy Prudhomme refused theirs, politely and with old-fashioned gentlemanly grace, saying that they were just happy to be of assistance. Cleary simply neglected to bill them for the weekend, then dared them to complain. The four women staying in suite 1039 claimed to have been robbed. Among the items missing were a scarf, a belt, and a gray raincoat. They found blood and dirty boot tracks on the carpeting leading in from the balcony. _In_ from the balcony. A balcony on the tenth floor. Lisa, the people-pleaser, didn't point out how ludicrous their claims sounded. Anyway, she knew better. Both she and the Lux would be more than happy to compensate them for Rosemary Wheeler's disguise.

After lunch, finally, she had a chance to call the hospital. Information transferred her to the nurse's island in the ICU. Pamela Tucker did not take the call. The woman who did answer told her, after a long, fact-checking pause, and Lisa was stunned at the words: "He discharged himself." Lisa said, "Thank you," and hung up. The police had recovered her phone from among Rosemary Wheeler's belongings. Jackson hadn't called it from the hospital. Nor had he called her at the Lux. He'd checked out and left, and that was all. Angry and numb, Lisa went back to work.

*****

She got home just after eight. A follow-up hell of a day. One of the messages on her answering machine was not from her father: _I can't get comfortable in a hospital bed, _Jackson said. His voice sounded tired, a little flatter than usual._ Hope you understand_.

"I understand that you left without saying goodbye, you asshole," she told the machine. She kicked off her shoes on the way to her bedroom.

*****

Jackson was in her bed. On it, really. Sprawled, asleep, on the comforter, wearing the light ash t-shirt and the khakis that Carter must have bought for him. He was pale and peaceful and angelic. Stubble was already darkening his cheeks.

He had the handset to the bedside phone cradled to his chest.

Lisa walked over to the bed, leaned down, kissed the corner of his mouth. Jackson opened his eyes. For a moment, he looked disoriented. But he didn't react with violence. Didn't lash out, didn't grab her--

He focused up at her. "I was going to call you at work—I just wanted to close my eyes for a minute." He frowned muzzily, propped himself up on his elbows. Cautiously, mindful of his incision. "What time is it--?"

"Eight thirty." She thought of him, running on drugs and instinct, discharging himself, leaving the hospital; she thought how that instinct had led him home.

To her.

She added, more softly, her tone no-nonsense but forgiving: "Please tell me you didn't drive here."

"No. I took a cab."

They were both numb, exhausted. Likely equally bruised. It had been a more-than-unreal two days. At least her head no longer hurt. Lisa undressed, took a shower. Put on a t-shirt, a pair of loose lounging pants. Jackson had both of the bed's pillows. She smoothly yanked hers out from under his head and stretched out beside him.

They lay beside one another for nearly a minute, simply breathing.

"Something's troubling you," he said.

She didn't ask, _Do you want the full list, or just the highlights?_ Rosemary Wheeler, the danger to the hotel, piano aerodynamics, not even _How many of your psychotic exes can I expect to meet, Jackson?_

She simply said: "You'd die for me."

"Yes."

Lisa looked away.

"That frightens you." Jackson slipped his fingers gently down her right wrist, took and held her hand. "Why?"

As if the idea that he would give his life for her was the most obvious truth in the world. As if it were absolutely elemental. And it was. Moreover, Lisa knew, it was absolutely mutual: she would die for him, too. That's what made it frightening. Wonderful and frightening.

She settled closer to him. "Maybe because I'm trying to be mad. 'Mrs. Rippner'?"

"For all of-- what? Fifteen minutes?"

"You were awake?"

"Just enough to know you were with me."

"Jackson, Rosemary might have walked in and said _she_ was 'Mrs. Rippner.'"

"No, she wouldn't. She might kick me when I'm down, but not when I'm _that_ down. She has her pride."

"She won't be kicking anything for some time. We caught her at the Lux last night. No, Cynthia did, actually: Cynthia caught her."

"Good for Cynthia," Jackson said. Lisa could hear his grin.

"Good for Cynthia, bad for Rosemary's nose." Lisa smiled, too, with a hint of self-satisfied malice. "Cynthia said I'm having an effect on her."

"Wonder Woman. _Women_. I like that. You're a good influence, Reisert." Jackson shifted closer, tipped his head to hers. "So, fifteen minutes of being Mrs. Rippner: forgiven?"

"Sure."

"Unless you'd care to make it longer--?" He thatched his fingers on his midriff, looked casually up at the ceiling.

Equally nonchalant, Lisa replied: "Maybe."

"Maybe someday?"

"Maybe." Lisa rolled onto her side and kissed him, slowly. A debate-ending kiss. For now. "You need to get some rest. _I_ need to get some rest."

Jackson said, his voice a soft rumble, as she touched him: "We might want to take it easy tonight, Lise."

"I know." Her voice was just as soft. Things weren't yet settled: that she knew. She and Jackson had yet to find out who had helped Rosemary Wheeler to block their communications with one another. More practically, he needed to share with her the followup regimen for his incision. All of which could wait until morning. For now, for tonight, she reached to turn off the bedside lamp.

"Lie still," she whispered. "Trust me."

*****

*****

**EPILOGUE:**

Five days later, in a windowless room in a high-security Miami detention facility, Rosemary Wheeler, dressed in prison orange, her right arm in a sling, a bandage covering her nosebridge, nonetheless managed to look smugly at John Carter from across a steel-topped table.

"You're going to help me leave this place, John," she said.

"And why is that, Rosemary?"

"Three words--"

Carter watched her expectantly. Peaked his fingertips, his elbows on the table.

"-- I have Claire," Rosemary said.

Carter went pale. His hands collapsed slowly to the cold tabletop. "That's against the rules. You know that."

"Fuck the rules, Carter. Get me out of here, or she dies."

"I need proof."

"Give me your phone."

He handed her his cell. She dialed a number, handed the phone back to him.

Carter held the phone to his ear. "I want to speak to Claire Carter," he said. He listened. Then he offered the phone to Rosemary.

"She wants to speak to you," he said, smiling slightly.

Rosemary felt herself blanch. She took the phone. "Yes--?"

_Only three? Three to take me? You need to ask yourself something, Wheeler--_

"What's that, Mrs. Carter?"

_Would you rather deal with my husband angry, or with me insulted?_

The rest was moderately profane. Rosemary listened to all of it, and then she numbly handed the phone back to Carter.

"It's me--" he said. "Right, love. See you soon." He ended the call and put the phone back in his pocket, stood, straightened his suit jacket.

"Don't worry, Rosemary," he said. "It's a common mistake. Sort of a sexist misconception, and one, I must confess, that Claire and I have done little to discourage. Everyone thinks _I_ was the manager. The truth is, my wife was-- and still is-- a magnificently dangerous woman."

He smiled for her and stepped around the table, en route to the door. As he did, he reached down and planted a hearty pat on the shoulder of Rosemary's broken arm. "Enjoy your stay, Miss Wheeler."

Rosemary Wheeler didn't reply. She remained where she was, watching the steel tabletop, while the pain from her arm sparked in fireworks flashes before her eyes.

**THE END**


End file.
